Deconstructing Stigma

Changing Attitudes About Mental Health

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The Campaign

Deconstructing Stigma: Changing Attitudes About Mental Health is a series of larger-than-life photographs and interviews with people from across the United States and beyond who have been affected by mental illness.

Since the campaign’s initial physical installation at Boston’s Logan International Airport, it has found homes in various US states, and has traveled the world with pop-up installations across the United States and in almost every inhabited continent. The installations, website, and the companion books serve to capture the complexity of living with a psychiatric disorder, seeking treatment, navigating insurance and healthcare systems, and facing stigma.

Told through the eyes of its participants, Deconstructing Stigma boldly challenges the misconceptions of what those with mental illness look like. The volunteers in this project are more than just statistics or nameless faces. They are mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, lawyers, doctors, engineers, musicians, and more. Each one has been affected by mental illness, and each one has also faced stigma.

Travelers look at airport exhibit — The physical installation of Deconstructing Stigma, on view now at Boston’s Logan Airport

Stigma—it’s an ugly word, and it’s even uglier to experience. Yet 75% of people with mental illness say they have endured the pain of stigma. Despite the concerns of being labeled and risking further stigma, the volunteers in this project are courageously sharing their stories of hope and resilience so that you will have an opportunity to “walk in their shoes” and perhaps step away with a different view of what it is like to have a mental illness.

1 in 5 Americans will experience mental illness in his or her lifetime. It is something that affects us all. If you are struggling with symptoms of an illness, or if you feel like no one would understand what you’re experiencing, this campaign is for you. You are not alone.

This project was developed by McLean Hospital, in partnership with local and national organizations. Together, we are deconstructing stigma, and together, we are changing lives.

Stories

Natalia

With OCD, you are not your dark thoughts. You are okay

Natalia plays the scene in her mind over and over.

At 22, newly married and living in an apartment complex in Boston, she remembers riding one day in the building elevator where a young mother was holding her baby. Natalia gleefully played peek-a-boo with the child. The next day, she heard a “thump” while sitting in her apartment. The mom had jumped from a complex balcony to her death while holding the child.

Something like that can sit with you for a long while. And your OCD builds a whole narrative around it. When I had my son, I was deeply afraid I would do something like that to hurt him.

In fact, with each of the births of her four children, the intrusive thoughts would return. She says it wasn’t a psychosis—she didn’t hear voices urging her to harm her babies. The images she invented in her own mind of that horrific event played, rewound, and played time and time again. This was a symptom of postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

I would shut the windows and balcony area with duct tape to keep everyone safe. My kids tease me about it now. I was able to get on medication to stabilize the chemical imbalance in my brain. My children were happy when I finally became more ‘chill.’

For 15 years, Natalia had been misdiagnosed with anxiety disorder, delaying appropriate treatment for her OCD. Looking back, she believes her mental health problems started when she was about six years old after she witnessed a traumatic event.

As a child, I would walk five miles every day. I felt like I just needed to do it. I started cutting and stealing. I got arrested in the sixth grade for stealing stickers from a grocery store. I had done it at the same time and in the same way every day. It wasn’t long before the police caught up to me.

Her compulsions were not all bad. In school, Natalia was an overachiever. She would read everything three times, a behavior that consistently earned her top grades. She would eventually be accepted to Harvard.

She dropped out of law school when she had her first child, feeling the need to be overly attentive to the infant—or as she puts it, “watch him like a hawk.” She didn’t dare tell her husband or anyone else about the intrusive thoughts of harm that came back with each birth for fear her children would be taken away.

I learned that OCD uses these dark thoughts to continually torture us. The fact that we are terrified by what we are thinking shows we are highly moral, kind people. We do not intend to hurt anyone or ourselves. It’s just the opposite.

Today, Natalia serves as clinical director of her own OCD center, having returned to school to get a master’s degree in counseling. There, she helps her patients by not just exposing them to their fears, but by helping them develop self-esteem and a sense of worth. She says the most important thing she can offer is a sense of connection and community, given her own experience.

Natalia also believes more education is needed about the characteristics of OCD. Movies have mostly portrayed the disorder as an obsession around germs and compulsive handwashing.

We need to show the darkest part of the disorder, too. We need to destigmatize it. People with OCD aren’t terrible people…they are brave enough to seek help.