When I began practising as a psychologist in the 1990s, the stigma around mental illness was severe and largely unchallenged. Patients came to me in secret. They parked down the road from my office. They paid cash so there would be no record on their medical aid. They told nobody — not their employers, not their closest friends, sometimes not even their spouses.
Things have changed. Not enough. But measurably.
What stigma actually does
The harm of stigma is not merely social discomfort. It is clinical. It delays help-seeking — often by years. It causes people to discontinue treatment because the shame of needing it becomes unsustainable. It means that the people around a person with a mental illness are less able to provide support, because they too have absorbed the message that mental illness is something to be hidden.
I have watched stigma make people sicker. It is not a soft issue.
What fiction can do
I wrote In the Name of the Mother partly as an act of counter-stigma. Not in a preachy way — nobody wants to read a polemic dressed up as a novel. But in the most effective way I know: by making the reader understand a person from the inside.
When you spend hours and hours living inside the psyche of someone dealing with bipolar disorder, or inside the family that loves them and is exhausted by them and loves them still — you come out the other side with something that no information campaign can give you. You come out with empathy. And empathy is in a way the opposite of stigma.
The change I hope for
I am under no illusion that a novel will fix what decades of clinical advocacy have not. But I believe that stories shift things in ways that data cannot. If one reader finishes In the Name of the Mother and thinks differently about a family member, a colleague, a stranger who is struggling — that is enough.
Order In the Name of the Mother at https://janehudsonbooks.com/