The Politics, Stigma and Experience of Brain Disorders: A Blog Series
The holiday season is a good time to talk about brain disorders. The kind blogger S. Z. Berg talks about are more commonly referred to as mental illness, but that term detracts from the fact that depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia and other such conditions arise in the brain. Does it allow us to consider them less important than “real” brain disorders, such as tumors and strokes?
Mental illnesses are too often tossed aside as conditions that take place in the mind. (Last I knew, the mind was in the brain, and the brain is a pretty important organ—blogger Berg thinks you’ll agree.) People wear pink ribbons for breast cancer and other colors for other diseases and rally around them to raise money for research to eradicate these awful diseases. (And more power to these people.) But save for autism, she sees little energy going into standing up for people suffering from stigmatized brain disorders that affect thoughts and emotions and that leave their hosts losing out to fulfilling their potential.
