I am.....dubious about #WorldMentalHealthDay and I'll try to say why.

Lately, the MD of the agency I used to work for came back from Cannes. One thing he'd heard there is that "gen z have grown up with zero stigma around mental illness"

Now. I used to work in a psychiatric unit. Most of the time I was on the audit ward, with patients, all but 1 of whom were under section, who had more or less been hospitalised for the majority of their adult lives.

They had bipolar, schizophrenia, delusions, developmental delays. They could be violent and aggressive.

I also worked on the teen ward sometimes - the patients had OCD, had been suicidal, had eating disorders. They were under section.

Do you think, for one hot minute, that they felt *fine* about being under section? Do you think when they eventually got back to school, everyone was just like "oh hey Hannah welcome back"? DO YOU REALLY THINK THERE WAS NO STIGMA???

Do you think the adults on the ward who were on the same drugs they were on back in the sixties because treatments haven't progressed, who Knew they were under section, who couldn't see their families....do you hear about them on #MentalHealthAwarenessDay ?

No. We hear plenty about depression and anxiety - and that's good!!! Those are super common diseases that shouldn't be stigmatised!!!!

But I'm conscious we never hear about the grubbier side of mental health. We never hear about people under section, or people with "scarier" conditions like schizophrenia or DID or similar

I'm just thinking about the village by the psychiatric unit. How there's people in there tweeting about reducing the stigma about depression, while still feeling uneasy walking past the hospital, or seeing one of the patients in the corner shop buying fags.

. @hashtagdion wrote a really good post on this that I can't find right now - upshot being that there's a certain archetype of a mentally ill person as someone with depression/anxiety who is entirely non-threatening and...kind of comfortable to deal with for most people

But there are mentally ill people who are aggressive, who have addictions, who have delusions or hallucinations, who act in a way that can frighten or unsettle.

Are you concerned about those people too? Is #WorldMentalHealthDay for them? Or for the mentally ill people we feel comfortable around? Because we see zero discussion of those people. We don't hear their voices.

Until #WorldMentalHealthDay centres their voices and their experiences, it's only going to be relevant to people with a certain kind of presentation of a limited number of diseases. It's not going to do the Big Work of unfucking our attitudes towards mental health.

Anyway today spare a thought for the people with mental illnesses that we don't talk about. Seek out their voices. Don't just "talk".