Destigmatizing mental illness through sharing stories

By Seattle Times editorial board

The Seattle Times

Originally published June 12, 2015 at 4:29 pm

FOR Susan Fox, the social stigma of mental illness today recalls the collective silence around breast cancer in 1974. That was the year first lady Betty Ford and second lady Happy Rockefeller both disclosed their breast cancers and mastectomies. 

The disclosure emboldened millions of women to break their collective silence and spurred a revolution in cancer research.

That’s what’s needed today on mental illness. We need to talk more about it.

“You’re never going to get enough money going into that system until you have power brokers and rainmakers come out,” said Fox, a successful nonprofit executive who is open about her recovery from addiction, depression and anxiety.

Saturday, a new Seattle-based advocacy group, called The Stability Network, is trying to do just that with a storytelling event, cheekily titled “Not Dead Yet!” Katherine Switz founded the group last year with simple principles: Participants had to be successful professionals and industry leaders willing to publicly share their recovery from mental illness.

Switz has bipolar disorder, as well as a Harvard MBA and a résumé that includes her current job as a senior adviser at the Gates Foundation. She’s lived the stigma. When she needed psychiatric hospitalization while working as an executive at General Electric, she told her boss that she had a thyroid problem.

She’s open today, but said the launch of The Stability Network hasn’t received the response she expected. “It’s not because we’re not tapping into a nerve,” she said.

Untreated mental illness is one of the nation’s challenges. Stigma discourages people from seeking needed treatment for fear of professional or social consequences, even though their neighbors or colleagues might also be keeping the same secret.

Wayne Lynch, news director of Northwest Cable News, has used his personal experience to influence his profession. His brother’s suicide “sharpened all the sharp edges” of his psyche prone to depression and anxiety. Now, he pushes his newsroom to more sophisticated explanations of mental illness.

“We would like people in power positions in community businesses or agencies to say, ‘I’ve struggled with this and have had a good career,’ ” said Lynch.

Editorial board members are editorial page editor Kate Riley, Frank A. Blethen, Ryan Blethen, Brier Dudley, Mark Higgins, Jonathan Martin, Thanh Tan, Blanca Torres, William K. Blethen (emeritus) and Robert C. Blethen (emeritus).