The joy of stigma
Rod Liddle is all for tolerance and compassion but has no time for loony campaigns to rid the world of useful stereotypes Ithink my favourite ever name for a campaigning, single-issue pressure group can be found in the New York telephone directory: The National Stigma Clearing House. Its purpose is to stamp upon stigma wheresoever it may arise — and recently it turned its attention to a television programme called Loonatics Unleashed which, according to the NSCH, ‘gives new life to the most damaging stereotype faced by the mental health community: the misconception that people with psychiatric disorders threaten public safety’.
I assumed this new production must be a collection of CCTV clips of nutters and madmen behaving in an entertainingly doolally manner: in questionable taste, perhaps, but it might just wile away those dead hours after midnight. But it’s not — it’s just an updating of the old Loony Toon characters. In other words, it’s a cartoon starring a made-over Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny and containing no reference whatsoever to real-life loonies. But this fact does not for one moment mitigate the wrath of the fabulously titled pressure group: it wants the programme banned anyway.
Our own equivalent pressure group, the more prosaically named Stigma.org would probably agree with them. It has set itself a similar task, ‘... fighting stigma and discrimination in every aspect of life’. In the sphere of mental illness, for example, Stigma.org shrewdly points out that ‘members of the public are less likely to hire people labelled as mentally ill ... and less likely to freely interact with them.’ Well, would you believe it?
The general attitude towards the mentally ill of those of us who have not yet been so diagnosed is one of suspicion; I suppose you can, if you like, call it a form of stigma. If we meet someone who we are told is mad, or a nutter, or bonkers, then we are wary of them — until we become familiar with the parameters of whatever it is that afflicts them and we adjust our behaviour accordingly.
If the extent of their madness is that at night they sit in the garden in striped pyjamas and bark at the moon, then we might keep our children away from them but, otherwise, not deny them a polite ‘Hello, how are you this fine morning?’ every so often. If, however, they are prone to murdering people with machetes and subsequently eating them, we will shun them entirely and most likely call the emergency services. Only a very small percentage of lunatics kill people and eat them: we are all aware of this. But we are aware that some of them do. And we are aware, too, that other mentally ill people can harm or simply disquiet us in one way or another, which is why we are ‘less likely’ to give them jobs or to ‘interact with them freely’, depending, again, upon the nature of their affliction.
This seems so utterly bloody obvious, so plainly the correct approach, so entirely rational, that it should hardly need to be said at all. Of course, there is a stigma attached to being mentally ill and we are apt, upon observing maniacal behaviour, to casually confer upon the perpetrators the descriptions ‘psycho’ or ‘loony’ or ‘headcase’ — again, depending on the nature of their affliction. ‘Loony’ seems to me a wholly appropriate term for someone who barks at the moon, or hides inside a wardrobe all day, or hurls indiscriminate abuse at the traffic. It is a means of differentiating their behaviour from ours. ‘Psycho’ seems pretty apt for someone who kills and then eats someone, too.
Stigmatising serves as an important protective device both for us as individuals and for society as a whole. And it has the extremely useful side-effect of ensuring that the perpetrators of outlandish or dangerous behaviour know that their actions are not the norm and are viewed with opprobrium by the majority. With stigma, you kill two birds with one stone.
And yet the last 30 years have seen a con certed war on stigma. Forget for a brief moment the NSCH and Stigma.org; almost every single-issue pressure group insists that its primary duty is to remove the stigma from whatever afflicted tranche of the population it is serving: the mentally ill, single parents, homosexuals, gypsies, asylum-seekers and so on.
Those mental-health pressure groups Mind and Sane go on about stigma for so long and so often that frankly one worries for their sanity. And what they’re trying to tell us — these people are just the same as you and me, they’re not mad at all — is palpably untrue. For example, look again at that mission statement from the NSCH: it is not remotely a misconception that some people with psychiatric disorders threaten public safety — it is rather a wholly accurate statement.
The anti-stigmatists have control of the psychiatric agenda and indeed of the mindset of the people whom we entrust to protect us from nutters, madmen and psychos. A recent — and quite brilliant — paper from the Leeds University sociologist Peter Morrall, who had been investigating what he called ‘mad murders’, criticised the mental-health professionals for dismissing out of hand the concerns of the ordinary public when loonies were let loose in their midst. ‘There is justifiable anxiety about the perceived danger from mentally disordered people in the community,’ he wrote. ‘The perceived dangerousness of the mentally disordered is realistic.’ He added that the anti-stigmatists fuelled public resentment against the mental-health professionals who had, too often, let them down.
There is a point to the stigmatising of single mums, too. It cannot be easy being a single mum, and without question they should have our sympathy — just as those afflicted by mental illness should have our sympathy. Stigma and sympathy, after all, go hand in hand. But being a single mum is not desirable either for the mum or for the child or for society as a whole — it costs the rest of us a lot of money.
And, as Robert Whelan from the thinktank Civitas recently pointed out, the stigma served as a device to help dissuade women from becoming single mums. And the erosion of that stigma over the last 20odd years has cost us all dearly. Sure, many women bringing up kids on their own are not the architects of their own downfall that is often the result of the rapidly diminishing stigma in other areas, against divorce, adultery, the loss of virginity and so on.
The charities which look after the wellbeing of asylum-seekers regularly complain that their charges are afflicted by stigmatism. But what successive governments have done to asylum-seekers — held them in camps, watched them closely, checked them out is official confirmation of the need for such stigmatising. We are right to be wary; that’s all. Stigmatising does not necessarily confer blame upon the person stigmatised — it just tells the rest of us to watch out.
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