Celebrity mental health campaigning – a Trojan horse for raising awareness

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/12/celebrity-mental-health-bill-oddie-ruby-wax

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Are celebrities more of a hindrance than a help in changing people's minds about those who experience mental health difficulty? It's a question often discussed in mental health circles and one made mainstream this week by the spat between former Goodie Bill Oddie and TV personality turned mental health campaigner Ruby Wax. Oddie, who has publicly spoken about his depression, said he had stepped back from his work with a bipolar charity because it had become a "fashionable" condition. People like Wax and Stephen Fry were "making careers" out of mental health campaigning when it was not clear how much good they could do to promote understanding.

Wax, in response, pointed out that we live in a society that listens to celebrities, adding: "I don't feel great about that, but it is the reason Comic Relief makes millions each year. We should thank Stephen Fry for being the first to speak out. It's a very brave thing to do, and he didn't have to, to improve his career."

Who is right? We are seeing a concerted effort to reduce stigmatising behaviour towards people with mental health difficulties. Anti-stigma work in mental health has recently focused much on inspirational stories and role models or positive examples of people with mental health difficulties achieving things. Early attempts at this kind of action tended to be rather clumsy: "You think people with mental health difficulties are lazy? This man built the world's largest shed!"

The problem with the inspirational story, or indeed the celebrity story, is that it individualises mental health difficulty and, while seeming to appeal for greater acceptance, can inadvertently compound the idea that mental health difficulties are individual failings which may be overcome with a combination of vim, vigour and good humour.

The thing is, sometimes having a mental health difficulty is awful. Or embarrassing. Or disruptive. Or can make you unemployable. Or turns your house into a mess. Or any of the other unpleasant things having an impairment to your mood, behaviour, thoughts, perceptions or motivations might cause if you don't have some sort of aid to offset it.

The criticism of the foregrounding of celebrities in mental health acceptance campaigns is, as Oddie suggests, that it does not reflect a more generalised acceptance of people with mental health difficulties. Some people with mental health difficulties frame this defensively, seeing the celebrity with mental health difficulties as an "inspirational figure" who is held up as a rather unhelpful role model, an example of the way in which people with mental health difficulties can overcome their impairments and be successful.

This might be termed the "You're not as funny as Stephen Fry" syndrome. The celebrity, though, has access to more advantages and material aids than an average person with mental health difficulties, therefore is a misleading guide to what "the public" may expect a person with mental illness in their life to look or behave like.

Mental health difficulty is a series of impairments. We know that it tends to make certain outcomes more likely for us, such as lower incomes, social exclusion and a greater likelihood of other health conditions. We also know that different types of difficulties tend to make different messes of your life. These impairments have real implications for what any individual needs in order to live a viable and fulfilling life.

The "celebrity sufferer" (and there is one in every newspaper article ever written on mental health) who is used to front awareness campaigns can be irritating for the average person with a mental health issue, because in the case of a famous person, the public is being asked to accept nothing more threatening than a personality they already think they know. The celebrity may be loved or admired; the details of their life story or their difficulty may be well known. They have already established a degree of legitimacy; they have, after all and despite their illness, succeeded enough to be famous. The real measure of change would be if society could value a person with a mental health difficulty they didn't already know or admire.

While celebrities have until now been seen as the Trojan horse to smuggle discussion of mental health into the mainstream, we may be beginning to see the experience of more "real" people with mental health difficulty represented in our media. On television this still tends to be in documentary series such as Channel 4's Bedlam or the recent BBC3's It's a Mad World season. Famous people can help to kick the media door open, but it's whether others with more representative experience can follow them across the threshold that is the issue.

So, it's a bit of a score draw in Oddie v Wax. If, as Wax seems to feel, the thing people are being asked to accept about mental health difficulties is that people have them, then celebrities are a useful tool; but if we're hoping that people will consider what the implications of those difficulties and impairments actually are, then Oddie is right, too.

I like to think that we are merely at the "coming in from the cold" stage of mental health awareness; the initial stage of raising the idea that people with mental health difficulties are discriminated against and stigmatised.

The natural next stage after our current period of foregrounding the anti-stigma struggle is the shift from saying "let's accept that people with mental health difficulties exist", to "let's accept that we need to make changes to the way things are so that people with mental health difficulties are no longer excluded".

We're going to need far more than celebrities for that.

• A version of this article appeared on the OneinFour website

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