As usual, I think this was a tremendous initiative started by Bell. I didn't see the interview that Trudeau gave to CTV today, but heard it was pretty good from a number of different people. Michael Landsberg has also started #SickNotWeak to further raise awareness for mental illness. Hopefully we can keep de-stigmatizing mental illness and force our governments to provide more care for those who are sick.
I'm not sold on "#sicknotweak" as a tag line. For me, "sick" has never really been a good way to describe it. Some peoples' brains just work differently. It can cause problems; it can also be a boon in certain ways. A lot of the problems it causes are in relating to a world that's essentially set up for people whose brain works the way most peoples' brain works. "Sick" implies, first, deficiency, which is only partly true, but more than that it implies curable. Can't exactly cure the way someone's made.
On another note I've always thought that this is one of the better acting jobs I've ever seen in an ad.
Yup.
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I'm not sold on "#sicknotweak" as a tag line. For me, "sick" has never really been a good way to describe it. Some peoples' brains just work differently. It can cause problems; it can also be a boon in certain ways. A lot of the problems it causes are in relating to a world that's essentially set up for people whose brain works the way most peoples' brain works. "Sick" implies, first, deficiency, which is only partly true, but more than that it implies curable. Can't exactly cure the way someone's made.
Dude, what in the hell are you even talking about? First of all, how exactly are illnesses such as severe depression or schizophrenia a boon for anyone? Secondly, find me a definition of sick that contains either of the two qualifiers that you've listed, other than say sick-minded which isn't really what's being implied here. Sick implies curable? Really? So someone who is ailing from a chronic, incurable illness like say Parkinson's or ALS isn't sick?
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1. afflicted with ill health or disease; ailing.
If you can't function properly because of your mental illness or if it's afflicting you in a way that is making you feel unwell mentally or physically, that is a sickness.
I'm not trying to say you're contributing to the stigmatization of mental illness or anything, but you're way off point.
EDIT: And I'm obviously a sucker for taking the bait and engaging, but it's a little weird that you came into a thread dedicated to discussing and de-stigmatizing mental illness to discuss the semantics of a hashtag.
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Location: A simple man leading a complicated life....
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Greg Gets Loud after Losing His Brother to Suicide
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Calgary, Alberta GREG DUHANEY’S STORY
In 2012, Greg lost his younger brother Kevin to suicide. Kevin was never diagnosed with a mental illness – although Greg urged Kevin to see a mental health professional numerous times. Kevin often isolated himself from his family or made inexplicable accusations against them. And on August 27, 2012, at the age of 33, Kevin took his own life – leaving his parents and two older brothers to deal with their grief.
Greg sought counselling with a sibling loss group and then a CMHA suicide-focused loss group. The CMHA group sessions helped Greg process his grief and deal with his feelings of guilt.
“Being a part of the group exposed me to people with similar emotions and circumstances. I began to understand that a great deal of people who take their own lives are subject to mental health issues…. It helped me understand his suicide was out of my control.”
I'm not sold on "#sicknotweak" as a tag line. For me, "sick" has never really been a good way to describe it. Some peoples' brains just work differently. It can cause problems; it can also be a boon in certain ways. A lot of the problems it causes are in relating to a world that's essentially set up for people whose brain works the way most peoples' brain works. "Sick" implies, first, deficiency, which is only partly true, but more than that it implies curable. Can't exactly cure the way someone's made.
As someone who was never depressive until three months ago after a near death experience, I can definitely tell you I'm sick.
I can only manage to get out of bed for a few hours a day. I left the house only 3 times this past month. I wasn't made this way, I was never this way in my life until now and I know deep down I will eventually overcome it and be "cured" of it.
How you could possibly say this is a boon is beyond me
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One of the most satisfying things in the last number of years for me and my depression is when my sister and my family finally fully supported me and started to learn about depression and come to understand what it means.
Its so painful to have people you love think its a weakness, or a simple solution like just get out more, or the many things we hear from people who don't understand what we are going through.
These kinds of campaigns are terrific, and brighten my day to see these videos. When people ask me what depression is like its great to have short videos like the one with the lady who calls in sick "missing work", to get an idea of what it is like for us.
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I get where CHL is coming from here, and some mental "illnessess" are better described as personality issues. Some are and some aren't. That said, I think most of them share a lot in common. Like the "lack of spoons".
I know many people with various mental problems, from OCD to bi-polar to severe anxieties and phobias, and of course lots of depression. Pretty much everyone who has them seems to like The Spoon Theory, and many really connect to it.
The point being, the so-called "Spoon Theory" was first used to explain an actual physical sickness, lupus.
I would call it mandatory reading for pretty much everyone, although I'm sure many are already familiar with it.
So cancer isn't a sickness? It can be genetic (a.k.a. the way someone is made) and incurable.
Touche; maybe you're right technically. The colloquial meaning though suggests to me, "you have an abnormality about you and we can make you normal again through treatment". Something about the terminology just doesn't sit right with me... but it's not a terribly important quibble.
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Originally Posted by Itse
I get where CHL is coming from here, and some mental "illnessess" are better described as personality issues. Some are and some aren't. That said, I think most of them share a lot in common. Like the "lack of spoons".
Yeah, this is exactly what I mean. GAD, severe depression, these things can't really be considered boons on the whole any more than cancer can. It is worth noting that even in the case of cancer, for many cancer survivors, they'll say that their fight with the disease was a hugely important life event for gaining perspective and developing as a person, which is understandable. Doesn't make the disease less terrible.
However, what do we mean exactly when we say "mental illness"? Lots of these conditions are differences in how the brain works, simply put. For example, some people classify autism as a mental health issue, others classify it as a developmental disability. If we're talking about aspergers, autism, the spectrum generally (and I think we probably should), well, a whole lot of high-functioning autistic people face real challenges in day to day life, but are in many other ways incredibly well equipped mentally. Compare that to PTSD, which seems to resemble a lot of non-mental illnesses (it has a clear starting point, a clear cause, symptoms, triggers, and the goal is to cure you) - there's an instance where the term "mental illness" strikes me as being totally spot on. The point is, there are a lot of fundamentally very different things that we're calling "mental illness" generally. It's lumping a lot of dissimilar conditions into the same category.
A number of mental health conditions are partly manageable through CBT, and if you practice CBT every day, that has hugely positive implications for your ability to navigate day to day problems. In that sense, I'd probably be more inclined, not less, to hire someone like that if I knew about their condition.
As for Bell Let's Talk, I'm hugely sympathetic to the sentiment, but it's still at this stage a bit of a catch 22. In order to eliminate the stigma of this stuff, people need to talk openly about what they're dealing with, and as soon as you do that, you become synonymous with your condition in the eyes of a lot of people.
I can't say for sure but I'd guess it would have been like coming out as gay a number of years ago before everyone stopped caring; you're no longer "Steve from accounting", you're now "that gay guy". Sure, Steve and many like him had to come out for that to stop. But it's hard to blame Steve if wanted to just remain "Steve from accounting" and keep that other part of who he is under wraps.
I hope people have the nuance to be able to appreciate that that's not a criticism of this initiative, which is obviously important.
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Originally Posted by Thor
These kinds of campaigns are terrific, and brighten my day to see these videos. When people ask me what depression is like its great to have short videos like the one with the lady who calls in sick "missing work", to get an idea of what it is like for us.
Do you think that works, though, for most people? What I mean is, if you're the average person who's never struggled with mental illness, never having been the woman in that video, do you think if someone hears the sigh at the end of that call that it resonates with them? I'm honestly not sure.
Further question: there are always a bunch of people who really feel that they have some sort of condition, but it's "undiagnosed", which basically means "self-diagnosed". A bunch of them are probably right, many others are probably not. How do we feel about this? There are people who have received treatment for bipolar disorder or anxiety and gone through years of therapy and drug treatment to try to deal with these conditions, doesn't this behaviour minimize that struggle? But at the same time, a lot of these people probably do need help and due to how much harder it is to get consistent treatment for these things, just haven't yet, so just dismissing them also seems problematic. I hope I'm explaining this well.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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Good lord, is there nothing CHL won't semantic the sh*t out of? -Edit- Yes, I'm aware semantic is not a verb. I know I'm just giving you another opportunity to argue over inconsequential minutia.
The whole name of the goddamn campaign is "Let's Talk". Can we not have a ####ing conversation about these things?
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Do you think that works, though, for most people? What I mean is, if you're the average person who's never struggled with mental illness, never having been the woman in that video, do you think if someone hears the sigh at the end of that call that it resonates with them? I'm honestly not sure.
Its not going to change minds, but certainly will dispel the idea that calling in sick is no big deal to depressed people, and thus causes resentment in co-workers.. I mean you feel even worse after making that call, or sending that email, shame, anger, frustration because you feel guilty you can't just shake it off and go to work.
There are other videos I tend to use, like the sad dog one done by the World Health Organization:
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Further question: there are always a bunch of people who really feel that they have some sort of condition, but it's "undiagnosed", which basically means "self-diagnosed". A bunch of them are probably right, many others are probably not. How do we feel about this? There are people who have received treatment for bipolar disorder or anxiety and gone through years of therapy and drug treatment to try to deal with these conditions, doesn't this behaviour minimize that struggle? But at the same time, a lot of these people probably do need help and due to how much harder it is to get consistent treatment for these things, just haven't yet, so just dismissing them also seems problematic. I hope I'm explaining this well.
Well I was a person who went un-diagnosed for a good 10 years, until I reached a point where I had to check myself in to an emergency room. So for a long time I blamed myself for how I felt and spent a lot of energy trying to hide that side of me from others, very few knew how rough it was during that decade and I was ashamed by how I felt and very hesitant to think it was a medical condition because I had been taught that depression was just a weak excuse for people too lazy to work, etc..
I am sure some pretty normally healthy people might make claims they are medically depressed, but its going to be very few I bet, no one wants to be known as having mental health issues, so its not like people will pretend or self diagnose themselves with something that has such a stigma to it. But there are certainly some.
My worry is the people who are like I was 10 years ago, before I sought help, they are suffering when they could be living a much better life is they got the help that they need.
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its not like people will pretend or self diagnose themselves with something that has such a stigma to it. But there are certainly some.
My worry is the people who are like I was 10 years ago, before I sought help, they are suffering when they could be living a much better life is they got the help that they need.
I think this is probably right. Victimhood is starting to really gain social currency these days, so I'm not sure how categorically I agree with the former paragraph but I also don't want to overstate it and suggest that it's somehow a pervasive problem.
Moreover, and more importantly, the downside is minimal, but the problem of people like you not getting treatment is a serious issue that can and does result in misery and death. Which is really the goal of this campaign.
On the video front, I always post West Wing videos and I always thought that Leo's explanations for his alcoholism resonated. But that black dog one is definitely good.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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Haha, I really do enjoy how CHL has a West Wing clip for basically any moral situation.
On topic though - I think things like mental illness do exist, but we tend to over-diagnose them, which waters down the overall concept. Also, I don't really think that pharmacological treatments really work, and probably even have really adverse effects.
It seems to me like a general human consciousness problem. Something to do with the way your brain is wired, your particular context, and how the two interact.
Haha, I really do enjoy how CHL has a West Wing clip for basically any moral situation.
There's a reason it's the best network TV show ever made. Hell, for that matter, they did a whole long arc where one of the characters has to deal with PTSD.
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It seems to me like a general human consciousness problem. Something to do with the way your brain is wired, your particular context, and how the two interact.
Again, I think this over-generalizes. I don't want to speak for them, but I'd bet doctajones's experience is totally different from Thor's. The same goes for the effectiveness of pharmacological treatments. Different drugs will work to different degrees for different people. This demonstrates the problem with tagging some very diverse conditions as falling under one big umbrella of "mental illness".
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
There's a reason it's the best network TV show ever made. Hell, for that matter, they did a whole long arc where one of the characters has to deal with PTSD.
Again, I think this over-generalizes. I don't want to speak for them, but I'd bet doctajones's experience is totally different from Thor's. The same goes for the effectiveness of pharmacological treatments. Different drugs will work to different degrees for different people. This demonstrates the problem with tagging some very diverse conditions as falling under one big umbrella of "mental illness".
I can definitely accept that it is an over-generalization, but that is the problem with lots of mental illness in that it categorically defies definition outside of a very few specific cases - say psychosis.
As for your second point, that is kind of along the lines of what I actually said - it seems to be a human consciousness probably, and doesn't always need to be described as a defect or illness.
Kierkegaard was chronically neurotic. Pascal was probably one of the most alienated human beings ever. Under our current definitions, both would be classified as mentally ill.
#BellLetsTalk #SickNotWeak
