This is self-work and I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford.

At self-work we'll discuss psychological and emotional issues common in today's world and what to do about them.

I'm Dr. Margaret and self-work is a podcast dedicated to you taking just a few minutes today for your

own Self-Works.

Hi and welcome or welcome back to Self-Works.

I'm so delighted you're here. Today we're going to

be talking about confronting the stigma or the prejudice against mental

illness and really what I think the topic is is vulnerability admitting and revealing

vulnerability or understanding vulnerability and acceptance of that in our society.

You know 20% of Americans will have some form of mental illness during the year.

Not always severe mind you, but some form of it.

And I'm so lucky to have listeners that are not living in the United States.

But many countries have prevalence is similar to the United States, but some less and some more.

However, with that larger number, I imagine more of you actually have some kind of

experience with mental illness because you've tuned into a mental health

podcast so it's a little mind-boggling to think, why haven't we done a better job of addressing the

prejudice in our culture against mental illness?

We'll talk about that in a minute.

But first, we're going to talk about how stigma gets expressed in our culture.

We're going to focus on the difficulty of chronic mental illness that actually in my opinion

has more stigma attached to it. I'm going to give you some quotes from people

who I think you'll find interesting who have confronted their depression or

...