Mental Illness is Neither a Mark of Shame nor a Badge of Honor
Efforts to de-stigmatize mental illness in recent years have helped remove barriers that once made people in need feel too ashamed to get appropriate help with their mental health. But have we gone too far?
Social incentives and disincentives play a huge role in shaping human behavior. It's difficult to overstate this, but easy to lose sight of it.
We all need a sense of identity and a community to belong to. We want others to actively show us that they accept, support, and encourage us. We want to be seen as both special and ordinary. We've entered an era in which having a mental illness appears to offer a path toward exactly those things we long for most.
Or does it?
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that mental illness presents an apparent path toward the promise of them on the internet, which, for all that it lacks, serves as a primary source of social interaction for many people: most of all, adolescents and young adults, and especially since the pandemic began. What's less certain is whether this promise holds true in "real life" relationships, and how it plays out over time.
Developing an identity is a long, confusing, and scary process. So, too, are finding one's place within a community, learning how to contribute value, and building a sense of self-esteem based in genuine competence as well as confidence. The temptation to skip past the complexities and uncertainties of these developmental challenges when a simpler path is available has a powerful pull. But at what cost?
By presenting mental illness as a badge of honor, we encourage individuals in less than optimal mental health to emphasize their weaknesses over their strengths. We socially disincentivize actions that aid recovery, like pulling yourself off the couch and away from the phone to go for a hike, pick up an instrument, or read a book. Behaving like someone who is capable of solving their problems now means risking the loss of validation from one's tribe. At worst, it poses the threat of being ostracized as a traitor.
Our collective incentivizing of remaining unwell parallels Münchausen syndrome by proxy - a sickening form of psychological abuse in which a parent teaches a child and everyone surrounding them that the child is gravely ill. In such an environment, one cannot develop the strengths that are necessary to live a meaningful and productive life. A person who would have been adequately capable, despite having their share of human quirks, now becomes psychologically crippled and at high risk for a lifelong personality disorder. The effects can be disastrous.
Mental illness is neither a mark of shame nor a badge of honor.
