The conclusion I made about this years ago is that, generally speaking, well-educated, intelligent, and informed people do not have a stigma regarding any illness.

They know that the human is subject to all kinds of physical and mental illnesses, and the ones that get the spotlight are the most severe types that draw attention.

Some say that "it's alive and well"; that may be true in some places. I prefer to live in a place where there is enough education and enlightenment about mental illness not to have to deal with an outlook like that.

Others will disagree; so be it. We aren't responsible for what we were born with; we are accountable to ourselves and others for behavior that doesn't hurt another intentionally and is responsible.

One I know used to say if "life gives you a lemon, make lemonade". I prefer that.

I don't like this analogy but I will use it because it might be appropriate for some who hold stigmas related to illnesses of any type. There was a time when leprosy was considered an untouchable social condition. Then it was discovered that it was caused by a virus and could be cured. We don't hear too much about that anymore.
There were whispers years ago about so-and-so's having cancer. What nonsense!

I knew a socialite whose father was bipolar and she was also. Hers was so severe that friends had to watch over her expressions to make sure she wasn't entering a severe depression. There was no stigma attached to her. She was highly respected and a strong social leader in the church and in the community.

The reason that stigma exists so in some places is related to the fact that what is negative is more easily absorbed by the brain than what is positive. I even know a few paranoid personalities who hide their illness by looking down on others. I suppose it gives them some sort of false sense of superiority.

It's so stone-age backwards to hold such negativity in relation to human conditions.

Enlightenment is the positive view and, secondly, when the genes responsible for
bipolar illness are determined, or if it turns out to be a cerebral allergy, things will change for the less educated and negative thinkers. Hopefully, that time is coming soon, but it won't until information reaches them that reveals the brain is no less subject to illness than the kidneys, the liver, the pancreas, the spleen, or the stomach.

I just don't attach a high priority to owning a stigma that some do. I see that as an effort to cover one's own failure, not the failure of the mentally ill person.

But it's there mostly in the buiness world, my psychiatrist says, because of the medical costs which businesses must pay for their employees who are bipolar. Money, money, money, folks.

I know there will be strong disagreement; I expect it, but I still believe that people
like Dr. Kay Jamison Redfield, a bipolar herself and a psychiatrist who teaches regarding the illness at a university (and has written at least two books on the subject) was told by her co-doctors just to be sure she took her medications.

That's the view that most appeals to me, not the one that I heard once from a poor woman who said about another, "he's got somethin' wrong wiff his haid".

Take care.