More "real" people please

Anti-stigma campaigns have often turned to celebrities to try to raise awareness of mental illness.  In our celebrity-obsessed culture, people may be more likely to take notice of a celeb with experience of mental illness.  But this approach has never been risk free.  Celebrities often come with their own agendas - a book to sell, a new movie or a music tour, or (even worse) some unpleasant behaviour (such as beating up a partner or watching kiddie porn) that needs excusing.  While celebrities' symptoms may be shared with others with mental illness, their socio-economic circumstances are not. 

There is a big difference between the impact of mental illness on someone who is wealthy, lives in a highly desirable area, and has an occupation that allows periods of "resting", and someone who lives on meagre benefits on a run down estate, where every day is an uphill struggle.  When celebrities talk about their mental illness, it all too often makes mental illness look glamorous.  It isn't!

But there is an alarming trend for people to want a diagnosis - particularly of bipolar depression - because it has become fashionable.  Dr Diana Chan and Dr Lester Sireling, writing in the official journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, point to an alarming rise in the numbers of people wanting a diagnosis of bipolar depression because of the link to celebrity.  This situation is not helped by a trend in succesive diagnostic manuals to "soften the edges" of the diagnosis.  Originally, manic depression involved persistent extemes of mania and depression.  Today, it includes periods of overactivity and tiredness.

One result of the glamourising of mental illness through the use of celebrities is that as many as 50% of all people diagnosed with a mental illness may not be ill at all.  This means 50% of people facing unecessary discrimination and exclusion, taking unnecessary drugs and, often, being condemned to economic inactivity.

So maybe it is time to re-think the images that we use to portray the realities of mental illness.  While I am sure that celebs like Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax have had to cope with all of the unpleasant symptoms of mental illness, the fact remains that their experience is not typical.  Visit the economic wastelands of the South Wales Coalfield or the north of England, and you might start to get some idea of the day to day experience of mental illness: of the loss of hope that comes with inter-generational unemployment; of the widespread nihilism of alcohol and drug abuse; of struggling to bring up kids on meagre state benefits; of the mass medication of 9-10% of the population. 

Perhaps we need to be forward with the truth about suicide - that it is far more prevalent in deprived than affluent areas.  Indeed, depression and deprivation are the only statistically significant  predictors of suicide.

Most of all, we need to make clear that mental illness does not enhance people's creative potential.  On the contrary, for most it is yet another burden on top of the daily struggle just to make ends meet.  For the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness, their condition is not a step on the ladder to stardom, but a one-way ticket to a life of discrimination, exclusion and fear.