Hospitals

Three images that will change how you talk about mental illness

Before you tell a person living with anxiety or depression to "get over it" or "try harder" take a look at a comic strip and two photographs to educate yourself about mental illness.

Many people still don’t understand mental illness. If your first response to someone with anxiety or depression is: “It’s all in your head,” you need to check that response, and try harder to understand. Sometimes it is better to say nothing than to belittle a person’s health problems or reveal the depths of your ignorance. If only Fox News host Shepard Smith had taken that approach, instead of calling Robin Williams a coward.

In the spirit of public education, I am sharing these two images today. The cartoon at the top of this post takes common reactions to mental health problems and puts them in a physical health context. It is from the Robot Hugs blog.

A person is lying in bed clutching his stomach and the other person in the frame says, “I get that you have food poisoning and all, but you have to at least make an effort.”

In another frame, a person is injecting what I assume is insulin and the observer’s comment is, “I don’t think it’s healthy for you to take medication every day just to feel normal. Don’t you worry that it’s changing you from who you really are?”

All the comments in this six-panel comic are things that you should think quietly to yourself, but never say aloud. In an ideal world, you would not be thinking these thoughts at all, but I’ll settle for self-editing as a sign of progress.

This is not to say that you should ignore a person’s struggles. Don’t offer advice or pity. Try empathy and support, as in “I’m sorry things are bad right now,” or “I’ll be thinking about you.”

John William Keedy’s motivation for creating his collection of photographs “It’s Hardly Noticeable” was to help people living with anxiety feel less alone. His photographs also offer a visual education about anxiety for people who are not living with the debilitating condition. Keedy said that when he was first diagnosed he was embarrassed and didn’t know how to explain his condition to friends and family.

He talked to Maanvi Singh of NPR about his health and his work:

There’s a stigma that goes with having a mental illness. It comes with this idea of weakness of will. Which is weird, because if somebody had a broken arm you’d never tell them to will their way out of it.

And because it’s not something that a lot of people talk about, it’s easy to feel that you’re alone, that you’re the only one who’s having these thoughts and feeling these feelings.

Don’t worry if your response to his images is, “Huh? I don’t get it.” That is the point. You don’t understand what it’s like to live with anxiety so don’t try to explain it away or tell a person living with the condition to try harder.

It took seven or eight years after I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder before I started making these images. And to be completely honest, this started as a way for me to indulge my own anxieties and my own compulsions, but still stay productive in a way.

A lot of the images portray these repeated actions, and I actually performed the actions. So there’s the image with the floss in the sink. I flossed with 300 of these flossers. Thinking about it still makes my gums hurt.

But to be honest, for the most part it wasn’t completely unpleasant. There’s some comfort in the repetition for me. So the project sort of allowed me to indulge in this sort of thinking for a set period of time, and when I was done with a photo, it was fine to get it back under control.

You can read more about Keedy, his challenges with anxiety and his art on the NPR Shots blog. You can see all 18 of his photographs in the “It’s Hardly Noticeable” project on his blog.

Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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