“Anytime I tell people that I have schizophrenia, they always like them,” I thought you would hit your head on the wall in a psychological wing. “
But perhaps not their mistake. Most people learn about the disease through films that always depict people as violent, unpredictable, incompetent, and cannot be treated. Despite the great steps that are taken in awareness of mental health in general, schizophrenia is often not discussed like other mental illnesses.
So CulpePPER Open a tiktok account She decided to do what many patients do not want with the disease or could not: talk about it. Now, more than 690,000 people follow its journey.
“It took a long time to understand that I have a schizophrenia for a purpose, so I can’t make sure that no one feels lonely and the only choice is to kill themselves,” said Colbeber.
People who feel them SchizophreniaResearch appears, it can be depression, social anxiety and the quality of life, as well as low self -esteem, social performance, and the support of their loved ones. The stigma of shame can also lead to social exclusion, less education and employment opportunities, and worst housing conditions.
In the end, about 5 % of people with schizophrenia die in suicide; The risk is the highest when someone just begins to symptoms and has not yet been diagnosed and treated.
“For some days, I visited it until I do it, but I try to remind myself that everything that happens temporarily and I will order it,” CulpePPER said.
Schizophrenia has not yet entered the prevailing mental health
We have never talked about mental health more than we are talking about now, thanks to decades of awareness and research campaigns that we learned that it is good not to be fine. Despite all this work, conditions such as schizophrenia, as well as bipolar and Obsessive -compulsive disorderIt can be often forbidden as it was always.
on 1.5 million people in the United States She suffers from schizophrenia as he does 24 million people All over the world. This disease affects men and women equally, although it appears early for men (late teenagers or early twenties) and later for women (late twenties or early thirties). According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the disease is one of the 15 best causes of disability in the world, although it is not considered by everyone to give it.
“Everyone knows a person with schizophrenia, they do not know that he does this because people hide him,” said Philip Yanos, a professor of psychology at John Jae College of Criminal Justice who study the stigma related to mental illness.
When people avoid talking about schizophrenia and other disorders when discussing mental health, it baffles it instead of normalizing it.
Yanos said: “If we were able to change the way people feel about it, the way the feelings changed about sexual identity and orientation, which was something that people hid.
One study found that from 1996 to 2018, the stigma associated with depression decreased during Those for schizophrenia rose. In another study, the researchers analyzed the tweets published in 2015 and 2016 and found that schizophrenia is Most of the state of mental health is stigma. A study published last year found that nearly half more than half 13,000 tweets about schizophrenia It was published in 2018 and Artchch.
Fear and misunderstanding about schizophrenia was very bad 30 years ago that when the clinical psychologist Dr. Kazavier Amador worked at the School Research Center at Columbia University, it took three years to tell his colleagues that he had a brother with the disease.
“I was a professor of psychiatry who works with other psychiatrists and psychologists, and I was afraid and ashamed to see my colleagues as a person at a genetic risk of schizophrenia,” said Amador, the former Deputy Executive Director of the National Mental Alliance. “I knew a lot, but I was vulnerable to cultural stigma like anyone else.”
Even in 2023, the stigma is still in the health care system. People with schizophrenia often report feeling It was rejected, excluded from the important decisionsShe threatened to take treatments and get rid of humanity in healthcare places. Patients are often informed that they will never recover, and they have to wait for excessive amounts of time when seeking help, and they are not given enough information about their condition or treatment options.
Amador blames the entertainment industry for “reducing people with differences in the brain to negative caricatures.” Think of the 1960 movie mental patientAmadour said, where the main character suffers from delusions and the murderer ends. The “response of interaction in the media to intense violence” also contributes to misleading ideas about schizophrenia, according to Yanos, who said that the history of the mental health of a person is often published in public even when he has no relationship to committing a crime they committed.
Al -Amador said: “The truth is that people who suffer from schizophrenia are more violent or more aggressive than anyone else in the general population, the research is very clear.” “There is nothing frightening about a person with this disease, otherwise it may make you somewhat uncomfortable because they talk about meaningful things. Well, welcome to politics in the United States.”
There is more in life with schizophrenia
Browse through CulpePper, you will often find it laughing around all the times when her hallucinations put in embarrassing situations.
Sometimes, she accidentally holds a real person who is believed to be hallucinations. “I will be exposed,” said Colbeber. She works in a bakery, one stage is Cookie to the hallucinations of the cookie; Later I found a cookie on Earth, still in its cover.
She approached her from her husband’s schizophrenia, who is also suffering from the condition. He lived across the street and shown her herb, one afternoon. After a couple’s dates, Colbeber realized that Jonathan continued to speak with himself.
“It did not last long before we realize that we have schizophrenia,” said Colbeber. “My husband hears things and sees things, so we help each other to distinguish between reality and what is otherwise.”
Now they both work in the same place and they can be there for each other during the difficult times. When you are concerned, Jonathan helps calm her; When he talks to people who are not there, it allows customers to know that he is doing it sometimes.