I found this Letter to the editor in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and even though it was printed on Friday, August 24, 2007, I feel it raises some great points about how stigmas imprisons Mental Health Cnsumers in a ‘prison without bars’.  I’ve faced stigma in my own town, and can understand where this person is coming from.  In my situation, I was applying for a cashier position and after discussing my Mental Healt disability briefly, the store owner stated, “I usually hire people like tht for dusting”  I’ve never been back into that store since that day, because I don’t want to put money in the wallet of a business that would assume that Mental Healt Consumers aren’t capable of anything more then dustig.  I love the open and honest descriptionthe writer of the following letter to the editor offers and as I said, it was printed last August, but it is something that needs to be heard at every level of society.

Society’s bars

I live in a psychological prison — the bars are made of stigma, and society put them up. The minute my doctor diagnosed me with schizophrenia, up went the bars. It’s now 2007 and society still thinks that I have two personalities, am violent, live under a bridge eating from garbage cans and pushing a shopping cart around while talking to myself. How a society could be so ignorant for so long is beyond me.

My name is James. I have but one personality, have not a violent bone in my body, own my own home and have yet to buy a shopping cart. I work full-time and currently have a good career in the health and human services field. I supervise more than 10 employees and plan on continuing to excel in my field. There are many others just like me leading perfectly normal lives and living all around you.

I take medicine on a daily basis and with the exception of an occasional bout of depression have no symptoms at all. This illness has put me through sheer hell with the worst part being the way society has treated me. I believe that for the most part this society is cold and shallow, but I accept it the way it is. Why then can’t you accept me?

JAMES A. KINDLER
Ross