Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

182 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCHIZOPHRENIAsomething of a subhuman creature…. Mental health professionals oftentreated me…as if I were a stranger or alien of sorts, set apart from others byreason of my label. 73In contrast to Maria, the Guatemalan Indian woman whose episode of psychosiswas described in the last chapter, these Americans with schizophrenia must acceptblame, and must blame themselves, for their condition. They feel estranged fromothers; the stigma of their illness obstructs their social reintegration.With the growth of interest in community psychiatry, considerable attentionwas focused on the question of the stigma of mental illness in the 1950s and1960s. Shirley Star, using a series of vignettes depicting people with psychiatricsymptoms, conducted a nationwide survey of members of the American public in1950 and found the general reaction to the mentally ill to be negative and poorlyinformed. 74 Elaine and John Cumming, using the same techniques, uncoveredessentially similar attitudes among residents of a rural town (which they calledBlackfoot) in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1951, and found that the negativeattitudes towards the mentally ill were untouched after a six-month psychiatriceducational campaign. 75 After a six-year survey of residents of the Champaign-Urbana area of Illinois in the 1950s, J.C. Nunally concluded that the insane areviewed by the general public with “fear, distrust, and dislike.” 76 “Old people andyoung people,” reported Nunally, “highly educated people and people with littleformal training—all tend to regard the mentally ill as relatively dangerous, dirty,unpredictable and worthless.” 77 They are considered, in short, “all things bad.” 78In more recent years a dispute has arisen over whether the initial impressions ofhigh levels of stigma attached to mental illness continue to hold true.A number of researchers in the 1960s concluded that the public tolerance ofthe mentally ill had improved. 79 In the late 1970s, 20 years after Nunally’soriginal survey, William Cockerham again analyzed public attitudes towards thementally ill in Champaign-Urbana and found them to be somewhat moretolerant. 80 But other researchers found no improvement in popular mental healthattitudes between the 1960s and 1970s; 81 and a second survey of public toleranceof the mentally ill in Blackfoot, Saskatchewan, 23 years after the Cummings’original study, revealed that virtually no change had occurred. 82As recently as 1993, public surveys conducted in two English communitiesrevealed a similar failure to identify someone as being mentally ill as in Star’s 1950US study; the authors argued that there was a reluctance to label someonementally ill because of the negative associations of the term. 83 Some Britishstudies, in fact, suggest that certain types of discrimination increased in the1990s. 84 Misconceptions continue to abound. In Britain, half of the respondentsto a survey in the mid-1990s believed that setting fire to public buildings was a“very likely “consequence of mental illness 85 and, in an American survey, 58 percent blamed “lack of discipline” as a cause while 93 per cent blamed drug andalcohol abuse. 86 People with mental illness are more likely to be seen as being