Quote:
Originally Posted by sarahsweets
I think a lot of it has to do with the media's portrayal/ societal beliefs ingrained into people's minds by some movie or dumb book/celeb's bad behavior. Anytime there is a tragedy the first thing people look for is the 'why' behind it and the internet theories take off. People speculate about bipolar, autism, BPD, addiction, schizophrenia, etc based on something tragic or stupid that happened. Or if a famous person has bipolar and has some sort of fit or meltdown as a result of bad behavior they quickly say its bipolar that causes it. Or lets say a celeb has an actual mental illness and is in the middle of an episode then the media takes off about their personal mental well being. I am reminded of Carrie Fisher on a cruise losing it and reading story after story about her antics with no compassion. Or Britney Spears and the head shaving incident or Amanda Bynes. All of a sudden people have a vested interest in personal tragedy. Its like their own personal train wreck show to watch while people spin out of control through no fault of their own in many cases. And there are movies and shows- what comes to mind is Girl Interupted. Winnona Ryder had BPD in that movie and was in a long term hospital surrounded by cliches of mental illness. Its like someone opened a book from 1965 about BPD or psychosis or bulimia or whatever and decided to make a shallow movie about it. My understanding is that this movie was based on a book but Hollywood made it so much more sensational. I cringe anytime anyone with notoriety has an issue and a mental illness because its only a matter of time before people turn the convo about stereotypical behaviors associated with mental illness. Most people will not watch a movie or twitter clip about someone in crisis and investigate the illness or situation further. All they do is hit 'share' or copy and paste the link into their post and in two seconds its viral. Who can fight that? Adding to that is the rampant self diagnosis's people give themselves based on a celeb or a tidbit of info they see or hear or read. "I am so up and down today its like I am bipolar". Nearly everyone with BP has heard that before. I feel the same way about narcisissim. All of a sudden everyone is a narcissist.
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I agree with this, the media is where most people get their "information." For some reason the media also seems to associate bipolar with serial killers, never really understood that one.
I'm still not a fan of changing words or using euphemisms. IMHO it doesn't help against racism and it won't help here. I will say that "behavioral health" is a stupid term that has all the wrong implications. Those are the sort of words that are worth changing. But I don't really see what's wrong with the word "bipolar", and I'm even fine with "manic depressive", for that matter.
In some cases all the euphemisms make it worse. It's like in some mental health facilities where they insist on calling people "clients" instead of "patients." I would rather just be called a patient because by going out of your way to use euphemisms, to me it just implies that there's something so shameful about the situation that we can't just call it what it is.