Badges

When the phone rings at Mental Health America of Licking County it’s generally because someone needs help. Sometimes that help takes the form of redirecting the caller who may have called us by mistake, but many times people call MHA because they know something is wrong and they don’t know how to make it right.

I have a scar over my left eye. I like to tell people that I got from a motorcycle accident. I know people who attribute their crows feet to experience and their furrowed brows to their children and their laugh lines to their grandchildren. These are the badges, the benchmarks of lives lived and experiences collected. We all have them: some of us show them off and some of us go to extraordinary lengths to conceal them.

But when it comes to the health of our brains it seems that most of us would prefer to remain undercover in the belief that if the rest of the world can’t see our badges, then our identity is protected.

This was brought to mind by a call we recently received. A mother called out of love and concern for her son who experiencing some behavioral challenges. She knew something was not right, but did not know how to make it right.

After talking with a member of the MHA staff, it seemed pretty clear that her son was experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. She was advised to seek help from a mental health professional to get a diagnosis and to initiate treatment. We offered to provide her with some educational materials about the disease and other resources.

The mother responded that her husband didn’t want his son to know anything about schizophrenia.

This was an issue of concern for us because schizophrenia has a genetic component.

The mother disclosed that there were several cases of schizophrenia in her husband’s family.

Like with so many mental illnesses, great advances have been made in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia—much of it within the last decade—but the father seems to think that with no diagnosis there is no illness. It’s kind of like thinking that you can’t be overdrawn at the bank if you still have checks in your checkbook.

Among a range of challenges that we face in confronting mental illness, the most persistent and yet most addressable one is stigma. Sooner or later we are each forced to admit that flawless beauty and perfect health are ideals and yet we stubbornly cling to this notion that our brains are always 100% healthy. Life takes its toll on the brain just as much, if not more so than on the rest of the body.

When someone asks me about my scar, I have an opportunity to tell a funny story. The badges caused from a mental illness can also become opportunities, but we first have to recognize and accept them.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director