“Altering public attitudes toward the mentally ill depends largely on whether they receive treatment that works,” writes author and psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel in The New York Times. 

“This, in turn, sets in motion a self-reinforcing momentum: the more that treatment is observed to work, the more it is encouraged.”

To make her point, Dr. Satel points to the British reality television series “How Mad Are You.”  The show took five people with a mental illness and five people without and had them live together in an English castle.  Over the course of a week they were given challenges, such as performing stand-up comedy, designed to elicit symptoms of their mental illness.  At the end a panel of experts would try to see if they could tell which of the 10 had a mental illness.  They could not.

The point?

Dr. Satel hopes that the take away people gain is not that people with mental illness are no different than anyone else.

“Such a soothing fiction distracts from the true reason the experts were stumped,” the American Enterprise Institute scholar pens. “It is not because people with psychiatric problems are indistinguishable from others. The experts floundered because the participants’ most dramatic symptoms — immobilizing depression, agitated mania, relentless hand washing and so on — had been treated and were under control.”

The bottom line, Dr. Satel points out, is that well-meaning antistigma campaigns alone will not reverse attitudes about people with mental illness.  Treatment is the crucial element. 

“No matter how sympathetic the public may be, attitudes about people with mental illness will inevitably rest upon how much or how little their symptoms set them apart.”

Dr. Satel makes a convincing point.