When Rose Alberghini, the executive director of NAMI PA York, invited me to speak about barriers to good mental health care, the first obstacle that entered my mind was stigma. The way that the media, especially Hollywood, portrays persons with mental disorders is so crass, cruel and destructive that people are often afraid to acknowledge that they might need help. 
We should not separate the mind from the rest of the body when it comes to illnesses. The heart can get sick and so can the brain. Yet, we insist on viewing mental disorders separate from other physical aliments. Part of the problem, of course, is that we don’t know the biological underpinnings that cause bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Until we do, there are bound to be arguments. But what we do know is that persons who suffer from mental disorders are rarely portrayed sympathetically.
We would never make a person with Downs Symdrome the butt of a joke. Yet, persons with mental problems continue to be easy targets.
