Selena Gomez recently spoke to Vogue magazine about her experiences with mental illness and getting help. Selena is another example of a celebrity using their voice to erase the stigma about mental illness and getting treatment. The things that celebrities say have a lot of push. Their message is able to reach a huge mass of people. For Selena- or anyone for that matter- to be open about mental illness helps to normalize the experience and decrease stigma. Here are some of her quotes about mental health.
Blurbs from Selena’s Vogue interview
Before getting treatment, Selena was on tour performing her music. Looking back, she had this to say in her Vogue magazine interview:
“My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it—which, I think, was a complete distortion…”Continue reading Selena Gomez Talks About Her Mental Health
Smiling depression. A person can look as if their whole life is together but still be suffering from depression. Everyone experiences and expresses their depression symptoms differently. Psychology Today defines smiling depression as “appearing happy to others, literally smiling, while internally suffering with depressive symptoms. Smiling depression often goes undetected. Those suffering often discount their own feelings and brush them aside. They might not even be aware of their depression, or want to acknowledge their symptoms due to a fear of being considered weak.”
In American society, a lot of words are casually kicked around that have the power to be stigmatizing, insulting, and harmful. Almost everyone is guilty of it; you find out that it’s supposed to be 70 degrees in February, “that’s crazy!” or you find out that your flights been delayed for five hours, “Oh my gosh, that’s insane…” These words, and many others like them, are thoughtlessly thrown around. But by using this type of language, society makes light the experiences of those with mental illness and other types of disabilities.
Because these terms are used so widely across our culture, replacing these words can seem like kind of a hard task. But it is an essential step to destigmatizing mental illness. Many of those with mental illness don’t have the same privilege as those who aren’t triggered when saying or hearing words like crazy, insane, and psycho. Words are powerful. They have the ability to hurt, demean, and stigmatize groups of people. To get started on finding alternatives, we found a great list of suggested words to use.
Lydia X.Z. Brown is an activist, writer and advocate for disability justice. Her website has a page on ableism and language. On it, Brown stated “I have included lists of alternatives to ableist slurs, descriptions, and metaphors, if you’re interested in unlearning the patterns of linguistic ableism in your own language.” Brown also provides a list of ableist words that can be stigmatizing (e.g. crazy, lunatic, nuts, stupid). Here is the list of alternatives from Brown’s website, with added definitions to some terms from dictionary.com: Continue reading Alternatives to the Language We Use
Wear Your Label is an online store that creates clothing to get the conversation started about mental illness. Their profound motto is: “It’s okay not to be okay.” Wear Your Label makes clothing that reduces stigma (they have a shirt that says “stigma free” on it), promotes positive body image and embraces mental health. Each of the team members behind Wear Your Label has experienced mental illness. All of the clothing items have phrases that support mental health. They also have a bracelet line with various colors signifying different types of mental illnesses. Watch their video to learn more!
Wear Your Label partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 2016. In this collaboration, they created clothing that aligns with NAMI’s #stigmafree campaign. Additionally, the online clothing store donates 10% of their proceeds to mental health initiatives. These initiatives include Jack.org, the Jed Foundation, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Project UROK, and Project 375, and the Semicolon Project. Wear Your Label also promotes fair, humane, and ethical work standards where their clothing is made.
Check out the website and let us know what you think!
Check out this video of some awesome celebrities discussing their experiences with mental illness and working on mental health. These women are using their platform to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health.
Did one of these celebrity quotes stick with you? Let us know in the comments below!
We recently found this article on WikiHow about how to cultivate a really supportive friends list on your social media accounts – Facebook is specifically mentioned, but this could be used for any Social Media outlet. The steps they list are all detailed on the website but we’ve included the main points of them here:
Stand Together is an amazing initiative located across Allegheny County. The program joins with local youth to break down the stigma associated with mental illness and substance use disorders. Recently, we did a post on the work the program does. SOVA also had the opportunity to sit down with Stand Together’s Project Coordinator, Danyelle. She had so many powerful things to say about mental health and getting rid of the stigma surrounding it. Check out the interview below!
For young people with mental health concerns, school can be a negative space. Individuals with mental health concerns, like anxiety and depression, can come up against stigma from their classmates, and maybe even the faculty. There’s much that can be done to change the stigma that can be a part of schooling. We’ve mentioned before that learning and talking about mental health can be a powerful way to reduce stigma. Luckily, there are people working within schools to make change from the inside out.
What words describe your child? If someone did not know them at all – how would you describe them? You could probably make a long list of things. People are not one-dimensional. And even if most of the time if they are one way, in certain situations they might be the opposite. Let’s say most of the time they are a peace maker – but if someone makes fun of their sister, they will pick a fight with them. There may even be things about them that seem to be opposites – but they are both there.
For example, maybe they have a lot of skill in math and science – but when it comes down to it, they could spend all their days just drawing with a charcoal pencil. People have many sides to them. And in one snapshot of their lives – they are one way – at another stage they might have left certain things behind and now there are new adjectives to describe who they are.
That being said, what does it mean to get a mental health diagnosis? Now is this something else that describes your child? Does it put a damper on their life – what does it mean when someone uses a word to describe them? He’s a depressed guy. She is an anxious girl. Sometimes when people use labels – it feels like a condemnation. Maybe it feels like they are really saying – he’s depressed – that means he is weak, no good, a failure at life, and he’ll never amount to anything. Maybe it feels like they are really saying – she’s anxious – that means she worries too much for no good reason, she takes everything seriously, and cries and complains too much about everything.
Think – are those things true? How could your child have been something else – and now this label makes them a one-sided person. Sometimes labels can make us feel so very small. Or feels like getting one means we are doomed. In medicine, a more humanizing way to talk about any illness is instead of saying: “Sally is a depressed 15 year-old girl” saying “Sally is a 15 year-old girl who has depression.” What’s the difference? The difference is that Sally is a multi-dimensional person and depression is only one part of the story.
Some people do not want to get help because they don’t want to own a label. Well, no one is a label. For the sake of figuring out how to help people, sometimes medical people will use labels so they can make a plan of what can help someone. But in reality, everyone’s illness is unique and different, has a different course, and could have been caused by different things. Using these labels is a simple way to talk to each other so we can communicate and try to help. Remembering each person is unique and not a label is always something to keep in mind.
Have you ever felt ashamed of your child being labeled as being sick? How did you cope with this?
An awesome article by Buzzfeed was published about what depression actually looks like. We think it’s important to understand that depression is a universal thing, meaning that it can affect ANYONE. Often, depression and anxiety are portrayed with sad, gloomy, black & white pictures- which is not always the case. In fact, people experiencing depression, anxiety, and many other mental illnesses often look exactly like somebody who is not experiencing mental illness! These dark and gloomy pictures used to portray depression are one of the major reasons people think the way they do about mental illness. It is crucial to share articles like this and inform people that these photos are not how mental illness actually looks. This is a perfect place to start in the battle to end the stigma around the topic.
Click the link above and let us know what you think! Do you think the pictures used to portray depression play a role in the stigma around it?
