We're All Mad Here: Fighting Stigma Through Humor

Last year in Canada, there were two nation-wide campaigns to fight mental health stigma.

The first focused on the financial cost of mental health. It was launched by one of our major banks, and had a slick advertising campaign full of dark colours and statistics. There were multi-page discussions in the national newspapers, as well as multiple bus shelter advertisements driving home the point: Mental illness is a cost to the Canadian economy.

The other, Stand Up For Mental Health, was launched by actual people with mental health conditions. The program is open to people with a variety of diagnoses, and trains them to become stand-up comics, making jokes and wise-cracks about the experience of being mentally ill, as well as other aspects of the lives of the comics. Last year, Stand Up for Mental Health did a cross-country tour to university campuses in the hopes of raising enough awareness to get a Pepsi Refresh Grant so they could get more funding for their work.

I encountered both of these programs at university.

I take a bus, so I couldn’t help but be reminded every day I went to campus that “Mental illness costs Canada $33B Annually.” By the second week I wanted to get a spray paint can or a marker or a post-it note to scrawl STIGMA across the ad. Mental illness stigma costs the economy a lot of money annually. It’s not that I have the Crazy that makes it difficult for me to go in to work some mornings, it’s that I’m not allowed to just tell my employers that my Crazy is being especially bad right now and ask to maybe work out some accommodations around that. Crazy is scary. Putting up a black and white gloomy photo and talking about the cost to the economy isn’t really fighting the “crazy is scary” stigma.

What does fight that stigma is people who have mental health conditions getting the opportunity to talk—either seriously or jokingly—about what that involves. In the cross-Canada campaign last year, people got the opportunity to see the documentary Cracking Up, which follows one graduating class from SUMH from their first tentative attempts at public speaking to a sold-out show that brought down the house in Vancouver. Along the way it shows how people with mental health conditions are all different, rather than a faceless nameless hoard of Scary Mad Folks in the Attic. It also showed how dangerous the stigma against people with mental health conditions are, as many of the successful comedians also struggled to keep jobs and maintain their families. Some of this is because of the difficulties in maintaining these relationships while struggling with a difficult or complicated diagnosis, but some of it was obviously caused by other people’s fear of Crazies.

What I really like about SUMH is that it uses humor to break through stereotypes and stigma. People who have tried to kill themselves, people who hear voices, people with OCD, they’re making jokes that reflect their actual lived experiences rather than some pop-culture version of it. I’ve listened to a lot of SUMH comedians, and none of them have gone for the cheap laughs of “I’m not OCD, I’m CDO, because it has to be in alphabetical order!” or “I do what my rice krispies tell me to.” They make jokes like one I heard in Halifax, which touches on suicide attempts:

“I decided to kill myself, so I took a whole bottle of pain killers. It didn’t work, obviously, but man, I didn’t get a headache for months. … My husband was so pleased!” (This, of course, plays off the “not tonight dear, I have a headache” idea about women and sex.)

SUMH also work to challenge people on why they’re so afraid of people with mental health conditions. As the director, David Granirer, points out in his opening monologue, 95% of crimes are committed by the sane. “So really, we’re way more afraid of you than you are of us!”

Both of these programs want to end workplace stigma against people with mental health conditions. By focusing on the financial cost, rather than the cost to people, the economic-based advertising campaign missed its mark entirely. They continue to show mental health conditions as a problem to be solved, either by throwing money at it or by making it go away.

Stand Up for Mental Health and Cracking Up want to get mental health conditions to a neutral place. Granirer describes it as the place where coming in to work and saying “Oh, the voices in my head are a bit loud this morning” should be as neutral as saying “Oh, I’ve got a terrible cold and I just need an easy day this morning”.

Further Reading:

• s.e. smith at FWD: Working Towards the Neutral Place
• My earlier review of SUMH
• mel mundell at Bitch: Sm{art}: Gepetta: Puppetry as Resistance [This post includes videos]

Previously: We’re All Mad here: Intake Interview, The Transcontinental Disability Choir: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art