Up Close and Personal: The Stigma of Mental Illness

A word to the wise: If you see Glenn Close in the security line at the airport, don’t approach her and say in a small, almost mousy voice: “Excuse me, are you who I think you are?”

It’s not that she doesn’t like to meet fans of the many movies in which she’s appeared — The Big Chill, Fatal Attraction and 101 Dalmations, among others. Something tells me she’s more than gracious about such things. No, the problem is, the question sends her into paroxysms of fear and uncertainty, as it inevitably raises another, existentially loaded one: namely, “Who does this person think I am?”

Close told this story by way of introducing herself to the Society for Neuroscience — to a capacity crowd in Ballroom 20 of the San Diego Convention Center. She opened the Society’s 40th annual meeting on Saturday morning with a talk titled “Bringing Change to Mind on Mental Illness,” this year’s entry in the Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society series.

But the question — who does this person think I am? — echoed throughout her remarks as she addressed head-on the stigma still attached to mental illness. Those who suffer from conditions like bipolar disorder and PTSD might ask it about family, friends and colleagues who harbor misconceptions about people with mental illness. Indeed, as we saw later in the session, they might sometimes ask it about themselves.

Last year, after spending the better part of a decade watching and helping her sister and nephew seek treatment for different disorders, Close launched BringChange2Mind.org, a website aiming to combat the stigma associated with mental illness. She knew firsthand the power of this stigma. She and her sister came from a “stiff upper lip, Connecticut Yankee family with no vocabulary for mental illness,” despite widespread depression and even a suicide.

And even as she considered becoming an advocate for those with mental disorders, she said, humble in the recollection, she worried about how it might affect her career.

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