Working in the Community
By Grace Milbrath
This past August, I decided I wanted to start a job in the field of my future career in psychology. I interviewed and got a job as a mental health rehabilitation worker. This organization specialized in rehabilitation for those classified as having a severe mental illness.
At this new job I would be responsible for independently supervising whichever facility I worked that shift. Before starting, I was nervous about what to expect. I had heard horror stories on both ends of being both the staff and the client in many mental health care facilities, which I did my best to take ‘with a grain of salt’ in consideration of the stigma off mental illness.
When I first started, I was warmly welcomed by the clients who expressed abundant gratitude for my time and efforts there. During each shift, I would clean, cook, and administer medications. I would also prompt clients to do self-care and other goals in their treatment plan. But my favorite part of the job was spending time with the clients. We raced remote-control cars, played music, and spent a lot of time talking.
I learned about their lives, their goals, and interests. Clients told stories about their families, experiences in locked mental health units, and even their experiences in prison and what got them there. A few clients told me stories about their bad experiences with pervious staff at other organizations. They shared that they were shut down and not taken seriously. They were told what to do with no consideration for what they wanted. The clients expressed so much gratitude for many of the staff they had now because they “genuinely cared.”
Many clients really loved to talk with staff and each other. One client said that they wanted to talk and share their stories and ideas that had eventually led to improvement in their mental health. They wanted to cause a “chain reaction” of people sharing that knowledge to hopefully help others. But sometimes it was difficult for them to feel comfortable talking. One client in particular would pretty consistently ask if they were bothering anyone they were talking to. A lot of this feeling was due to past experiences of people reacting to them and their mental health poorly and negatively. This would often give them a poor self-image and they experiences stigma toward themselves. According to an article from the Journal of Clinical Psychology, “persons with both low self-stigma and high insight had less severe psychiatric symptoms and better interpersonal functioning than persons with both lower insight and greater self-stigma” (Yanos, 2021). Also notable from the same study is that “insight was only associated with positive outcomes when self-stigma was low” (Yanos, 2021). This self-stigma can result in isolation and further deterioration of mental health and negative symptoms.
The reality is that the high majority of these individuals honestly care for people. Due to their difficult experiences with mental illness, they knew how it felt and did not wish it on others. But, when most people hear that someone is diagnosed specifically with severe mental illness, they often become afraid of that individual. The stigma of the belief that people who are mentally ill are dangerous, violent, and don’t care for others. Even when I had clients experience things like psychosis, showing symptoms like talking to oneself and yelling, they still were making efforts to ask how I was and how school was going. It is true that there are occasions where individuals with severe mental illness can became violent, but most often that is not the case as long as they are given space and treated with respect and care.
Everyone, especially those wanting to work in the mental health field, must try their best to change and get rid of stigmas about those with mental illnesses. People wanting to work in this field should be patient, kind, and open-minded. Even those not wanting to work in the field should be thinking about their stigmas, because many people are mentally ill, and you may not even know. It’s really impactful to be compassionate toward everyone. It was found that, “unfavorable attitudes are mainly reflected by pessimism about the prospects of recovery, difficulty in viewing people with severe mental illness as no different from other people and desire to keep distance in social encounters of greater intimacy” (Economou, 2020). In other words, people with mental illnesses should be treated the same socially as anyone else. The more people that are compassionate to those struggling with mental illness, the less stigma they will face, including stigma toward themselves.
References
Yanos, P. T., Adams, S., Roe, D., & Lysaker, P. H. (2021). The impact of illness identity on recovery from severe mental illness: A test of the model. J Clin Psychol, 77, 2341– 2352. https://doi-org.ezproxy.mnsu.edu/10.1002/jclp.23155
Economou, M., Peppou, L. E., Konstantinos, K., Palli, A., Irene, T., Emilia-Maria, L., Rossetos, G., & Charalampos, P. (2020). Mental Health Professionals’ Attitudes to Severe Mental Illness and Its Correlates in Psychiatric Hospitals of Attica: The Role of Workers’ Empathy. Community Mental Health Journal, 56(4), 614-625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-019-00521-6