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MYTH:
People with mental illness are poor and/or less intelligent.* FACT: Many studies show that most people with mental illness have average or above-average intelligence. Mental illness, like physical illness, can affect anyone regardless of intelligence, social class or income level.
*Taken from the Canadian Mental Health Association website
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A client at our program in the Bronx responds:
"Workmen came to my apartment to repair a sink, and I could tell immediately that they believed this. They spoke to me like I was child. I could also see it in their eyes that they were afraid, that they didn't know what to do or what to say to me. They didn't know that I am just like them.
When that happens I feel a number of different things. Sometimes, like when I am riding the bus, it turns me off and I have to turn away. Other times I can take it and flip it and show them how smart I am and how ignorant they are. They are the ones who don't see that I have so much to give, that their believing this is the same as believing the world is flat!"
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And just for the record, Hillel Hirshbein, Assistant Director of Bronx REAL, points out the following:
Leo Tolstoy, Author of War and Peace, revealed the depth of his own mental illness in the memoir Confession. He suffered from clinical depression, hypochondriasis, alcoholism, and substance abuse.
Ludwig van Beethoven is documented as having suffered from bipolar disorder in The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb.
John F Nash, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
* (http://stampoutstigma.net/ 5/5/11)
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