FREE Webinar Method to the Madness: Mental Health Awareness Made Manageable

As with every designated mental illness awareness week or month, etcetera, to which I’m exposed via various media, the seemingly plentiful empty-in-practice platitudes I yet again read and hear, all supposedly intended to publicly dispel stigmas surrounding mental illness, leave me rather weary.

When it comes to the social reality of (at least for the foreseeable future) the prevalence of mental illness I’m often left frustrated by the contradictory proclamations and conduct coming from one of the seven pillars of our supposedly enlightened culture — the media, or more specifically that of entertainment and news.

First they’ll state the obvious, that society must open up its collective minds and common dialogue when it comes to far more progressively addressing the real challenge of more fruitfully treating and preventing such illness. After all, its social ramifications exist all around us; indeed, it’s suffered by people of whom we are aware and familiar, and/or even more so to whom so many of us are related to some degree or another.

Perhaps needless to say, the above-mentioned most commonly occurs when a greatly endeared celebrity passes away or dies an untimely death. This fact was in particular exemplified immediately following the many predictable platitudinous sound bites and mini-memorial commentaries from the late actor/comedian Robin Williams’ contemporaries as well as in many newspaper letters and editorials following his tragic suicide on August 11, 2014.

However, that’s when the doublespeak so boldly occurred. The vast majority of the mainstream media, if not in its virtual entirety, distinctly appeared to willfully overlook Williams’ full mental health diagnosis, if not current condition — i.e. bipolar disorder (a.k.a. manic depression).

With the exception of three newspapers (Alberni Valley Times, South China Morning Post and The New York Daily News), a few amongst a large number to which I had submitted a detailed letter on the matter, none of them replied let alone ran the letter — their conspicuous silence on this matter was to me deafening.