Widespread public ignorance of mental illness is encouraging discrimination against mentally-ill people. As a result, they are losing out in housing, education, jobs and healthcare, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has warned.
"People with mental illness are being left out of the equation," according to the chairman of the college's public education committee, Dr Peter Byrne. "They are the lowest on the public housing lists and the first to be discriminated against by landlords."
He said yesterday the accommodation crisis was so serious that he was about to readmit a schizophrenic patient because the only accommodation he could get was a bed-and-breakfast. An estimated 1,700 mentally-ill people were homeless.
He said the discrimination extended to prisoners, where those who were mentally ill were least likely to get probation, and to healthcare, where psychiatry got the smallest share of any budget.
The extent of discrimination against mentally-ill people was outlined yesterday when the Royal College of Psychiatrists opened a four-year campaign aimed at increasing public and professional understanding of mental illness.
The campaign aims to remove the stigma of mental illness. The college believes the shame attached to mental illness is worse than the symptoms. It leads to secrecy which acts as an obstacle to the presentation and treatment of mental illness at all stages.
The scale of the task facing the Changing Minds campaigners is highlighted by the results of a Lansdowne survey of 1,400 adults last May, commissioned by the college and funded by the Pfizer pharmaceutical firm.
The opinion poll found that three out of four people knew little or nothing about schizophrenia. Some 57 per cent believed people with schizophrenia were violent, and 45 per cent said people with schizophrenia were "hard to talk to".
Those interviewed claimed they knew nothing or very little about the following disorders: eating disorders (64 per cent); anxiety states (63 per cent); Alzheimer's disease (61 per cent); depression (56 per cent); drug and alcohol abuse (52 per cent).
Part of the campaign to change attitudes and behaviour towards mental illness would target doctors and other medical professionals where prejudice also existed, Dr Byrne said.
At the joint announcement of the campaign in Dublin and Belfast, a new guide for journalists and broadcasters on the reporting of schizophrenia was introduced. The chairman of the expert committee which produced the booklet, Prof Ted Dinan, said the guide aimed to help journalists avoid loose terminology when referring to the mentally-ill.
A consultant psychiatrist, Dr John Connolly, of the Irish Association of Suicidology, said his group was working with the Samaritans to draw up a guide for media reporting of suicide.
As part of the campaign a primary school educational package is being prepared, a cinema trailer campaign is being organised and there will be increased collaboration between healthcare professionals.