Blogging Against Disablism Day Post: Psychophobia 101

You may not be familiar with the term psychophobia.  You may know it as mentalism or the more general ablism or the more common older term stigma.  But whether you know any of these terms or not, if you live in the United States you have seen psychophobia in action all your life.  I define psychophobia as the fear and hatred of people with psychiatric diagnoses or those assumed or perceived by others as having psychiatric diagnoses.  It can take the form of social distancing, as in not wanting to socialize or let your child socialize with anyone with a perceived psychiatric disorder or not wanting your child or your sibling to marry someone with a perceived psychiatric disorder. 

Psychophobia is most visible in the media and TV and movies, but it is just as present in everyday life.  It is present when employers refuse to interview or hire someone who is otherwise qualified because of a psychiatric history.  It is there when people start talking about our troops returning from Iraq as scary and dangerous people who should be kept from owning guns.  Psychophobia is ubiquitous in political writing and discussions where the opposition, left or right, is so often called some version of insane.  It’s psychophobia that makes some lobbyists think it’s acceptable to cynically  mount a campaign to associate mental illness and violence to further their agenda, not because they believe what they say. 

It is psychophobia that enables politicians to cheer and applaud themselves for depriving an entire group of citizens of their equal civil rights under the law as if the people who have just lost their rights have no feelings or emotions or self-esteem that could be hurt.  It is psychophobia each and every time you or someone else uses the term “those people’ or “you people” to describe everyone with a psychiatric diagnosis. 

Psychophobia demoralizes people with psychiatric diagnoses.  It may demoralize them before they even obtain a diagnosis because once they do, all those horrible things they heard their entire life about “those people” can come back to them and seem to apply to themselves now.  Psychophobia encourages people with mental illness to isolate, to hate themselves and to identify with folks who put them down and hurt them.  Psychophobia has allowed doctors and nurses to use torturous “treatments” on people in psychiatric hospitals for more than a century and into the present day.  No one else is told that being tied down or put it isolation is “treatment” except for people with psychiatric diagnoses.  No other professionals would do that to their patients because it is only in psychiatry and other branches of mental health that the professionals are taught to see their patients as other than full human beings with the rights and dignity of all human beings. 

Psychophobia kills, demoralizes and oppresses all of us.