“Some people also believe that if you have a mental illness, you must be dangerous and unpredictable. This perception is often inflamed by media accounts of crime, although statistics don’t bear out a connection between mental illness and violence. Some people also believe that those with mental illness are less competent, unable to work, should be institutionalized or will never get better.

As a result of such stigma, mental illnesses remain the butt of jokes in popular culture. Negative portrayals of people with mental illnesses fuel fear and mistrust and reinforce distorted perceptions, leading to even more stigma.”

This is a short exerpt from an article about stigmatizing mental illnesses. To read the article in its entirety click here: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/MH/00076.html

I found this article very interesting. I’m sure we can all think of a time when we’ve called someone a psycho, wacko, crazy person, and the list goes on. But many of us don’t realize what we are saying about people with real mental health conditions when we utter these light-hearted insults.

This article is actually from the mayo clinic, but also posted on CNN.com I think the purpose of this article is not only to inform people, but also to persuade people. Stigmatizing people with mental illnesses on tv, other forms of media, and even personal intances is very common. This article explains the concequences of stigmatizing people. it is often very painful to a person to have to live with these stigmas everyday, and this article attempts to imform people of these concequences. At the same time, this article does a good job of persuading people  to look beyong the media’s portrayal of the mentally ill, and see them as something other than their label, whether it be “crazy” or “psycho” or “loony” I believe that this a a good form of persuasion, because it is undoubtably wrong to not only stigmatize, but hurt other people. Especially for something that they have no control over. I think that this article could influence a lot of people to challenge what they hear about mental illnesses, and form their own opinon based on fact, not on exaggerated depiction of “crazy people.”