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Personal perspective: How one statement set our country back a century.

“He opened our borders to people from prisons, people from mental institutions, asylums, terrorists.” In the same breath, a former president has lumped a class I belong to (people with mental illness) into the same fear-based category as terrorists. He has used a disease that I and 57.8 million other Americans (National Institutes of Health, 2024) live with as a political pawn.

A dark story

Like many difficult-to-understand phenomena, mental illness has historically been met with fear and fear-based abuse. The first available treatment for what we now know as mental illness was probably exorcism (Scull, 2015). Over time, exorcism evolved into other methods of control – chains, insulin comas, and large-scale institutionalization. These practices are a horrific aspect of our country’s past that is not typically covered in history classes.

In 1908, a man named Clifford Beers wrote a book called A spirit that found itselfin which he described his harrowing experiences with mental illness and the inhumane treatment in the institutions of the time. He founded Mental Health America, an organization that works for the welfare of people with mental illness. In 1953, the organization called on hospitals to recover the iron chains that people with mental illness had once been shackled in. These were cast into a bell as a symbol of the recovery of mental health.

Shortly thereafter, the deinstitutionalization movement began, when mental illnesses were understood as health conditions and people with mental illnesses were viewed as equal to all other people.

My mental health condition does not make me a werewolf

In fact, mental illness is not often associated with violence. Most violent crimes are committed by individuals without mental illness (Varshney et al., 2016).

Yet, as shown above, misconceptions and fear can be quite dangerous. In addition to America’s shameful history of oppressing people with mental illness, even today, a diagnosis of mental illness is the single factor most strongly associated with the risk of being shot by a police officer (Saleh et al., 2018). A person with a mental illness is more likely to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator.

My mental health condition doesn’t make me a wild-eyed werewolf waiting for its next bite. The same goes for others. Yet these stories of fear perpetuate a culture that doesn’t welcome us. These narratives keep people from seeking help for often treatable health conditions.

As with most other health conditions, hospitalization is sometimes part of psychiatric treatment, but let’s leave those shameful images of fear and words like “mental institutions and asylums” in the past where they belong.

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