Shattering the taboo of mental illness [View All]

[Doondoo]

Less than 12 hours after they lost their son to suicide last year, Eric and Trudy Garland found themselves writing his obituary at a funeral home. They were devastated but knew what they wanted to do. They described in the obituary how Brandon, a senior at McFarland High School, had struggled for years with depression.

"We didn't know any other way but to tell the truth," said Eric Garland, 43.

Mental health advocates say the Garlands are part of a positive societal shift in which more families are openly addressing mental illness in the obituaries of loved ones. By doing so, the advocates say, these families are helping to demystify an often taboo subject and are laying the groundwork for greater public support of treatment, research and insurance coverage.

"It's an indication that this is not a condition or a set of conditions that is hopelessly shameful," said Stephen Hinshaw, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California- Berkeley and author of "The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change."

Fifty years ago, few people mentioned cancer in obituaries because the illness was not widely understood and dying from it was considered somehow ignoble, Hinshaw said. The same thing occurred with AIDS in recent decades, and now mental illness is following that same arc from silence to acknowledgement, he said.



http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/top/index.php?ntid=119488