Mental Illness Awareness Week has been around for over 20 years. It’s a week where we are supposed to take time out to examine how the stigma we associate with mental health issues hurts the greater cause of improving mental health.
Instead, we already got to deal with Donald Trump belittling Post Traumatic Stress. On the plus side, we saw Joe Biden get more emotional in his response than we’ve seen in a long while.
Recently, Knott’s Berry farm had an attraction as a part of their Halloween event that helped continue the stigma facing those of us living with mental health issues. They shut it down in the wake of the uproar.
We also continue to see people dealing with mental health issues and other illness issues being killed by police instead of incapacitated.
Yes, this is a week where we should be thinking about these stigmas, but why do we do this for only one week? Why aren’t there more people focusing on this aside from those of us directly affected? Why do people only seem to care when certain events arise and remind them of this stigma?