At the Movies

In this month’s movie clip, Rollo May talks about anxiety, not as symptom to be cured but as doorway to creative response.  Rollo May was a recipient of the Distinguished Career Award of the American Psychological Association and a founding sponsor of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. He is author of numerous classic works on existential psychotherapy.  This video is a brief excerpt of a longer interview presented by Thinking Allowed.

For more info about Rollo May, look here.

The videos can be found here.

    It’s a common myth of our time that true mental illness is relatively rare.  It’s not always visible or obvious,

therefore we assume it isn’t there.

    However, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Statistics have shown that mental illness—things like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and so forth—are actually more common in our culture than cancer and heart disease combined! 

    Where then does this notion come from that mental illness is a rare thing?

    Perhaps a good bit of the misunderstanding comes from the social stigma that mental illness still seems to carry for many persons.  We simply don’t talk about it.  We would often sooner avoid the subject.  Even if we struggle with a mental illness ourselves we may not talk openly about it for fear than others won’t understand or won’t be accepting.

    Social stigmas are hard to overcome.  It takes time.  It takes education.  Fifty years ago it was cancer, or the “C-word” as people used to say, spoken of in hushed tones.  Twenty-five years ago it was AIDS (and still is, albeit to a lesser degree).  Slowly over time we’ve been able to overcome some of the stigma of those diseases. 

    Yet mental illness still carries for many in our culture the stigma of social shame.  Depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorders, addictions, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders … these are still seen by many in our society as character flaws, or evidence of a lack of willpower, or a lack of faith.  They are still spoken of in hushed tones as if we were afraid to name them out loud.

    One of the tragedies of this kind of stigmatization is that those who need help will often not seek it, simply because they don’t want to be labeled or further shamed by acknowledging their need.  Of those who struggle with a mental illness of one kind or another, less than 50% will seek help, even though treatment and recovery rates for things like depression and anxiety are higher than the recovery rates for heart disease!

    How can people of faith help? 

    It begins with education.  It begins by educating ourselves to the realities and the prevalence of mental illness in all its forms.  It begins by learning that mental illness is not a character flaw and that those who suffer from it can’t simply “snap out of it” or “get a grip.”  And it begins too with the understanding that mental illness is not evidence of a lack of faith. 

    The more we learn, the less likely we will be to accept or pass on the stigmatizing of mental illness. 

    The more we learn, the more able we will be to offer the kind of compassionate help that those who struggle with mental illness truly need.