Disclosure and Mental Health Recovery
Last week I conducted a presentation at The Mental Health Services Conference in Canberra (Finding common ground to leverage lived experience in order to support better outcomes). Research by Albert Bandura and Patrick W. Corrigan was cited to stress the importance of peer workers being positive 'social models', as well as addressing how my own recovery from bipolar disorder was supported by others who disclosed their personal experiences with mental illness.
Social models have the ability to enhance self-efficacy, reduce self-stigma and increase hope of recovery for other people experiencing mental health difficulties. However, in order to be a social model for this purpose, a person has to be willing to disclose their own experience of mental illness.
Given the existence of stigma, prejudice and discrimination in society, disclosure is a complex issue. Professor Corrigan and his colleagues developed the Honest, Open, Proud (HOP) program with the objective of reducing self-stigma. There are several modified HOP versions for specific cohorts, while the original version for adults with mental illness is available in English, Chinese, German and Spanish.
Self-stigma was formerly the single largest barrier to my own recovery, which ultimately took the better part of a decade. Importantly, disclosure is no longer an issue for me.
In fact, it was exactly 30 years ago today that I wrote my resignation letter to leave my corporate broadcasting career in Toronto to change the world during a period of elevated mood and seductive delusions of grandeur.
Given my specialist knowledge of the broadcasting sector and its regulator - the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) - it didn't take me long to speak to power.
A Toronto man plans to widen his crusade against some of the most powerful vested interests in Canada. Keith Mahar says the cable TV companies are overcharging consumers, hundreds of millions of dollars. The cable industry claims that Mahar is a crank with no case. But as Sean Mallen reports, Mahar has made believers of some members of Parliament.
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Peter Kent. First National - Global Television Network, 7 August 1995.
Years later, my campaign was described in the following way by the then-media columnist at The Toronto Star.
He is ex-Toronto cable-broadcast manager Keith Mahar who made a name for himself in 1994. He fought with a passion against the cable companies and the CRTC for citizen/consumer rights – and his fervour cost him his career as well as his emotional and mental health.
An activist David against the media Goliaths, he didn’t have a chance against the all-powerful cable monopolies and their allies in Ottawa.
Now he lives in Canberra, Australia, where he is a social worker and mental health advocate.
As documented in the short film The Naked Advocate, an episode of acute psychosis in 1996 interrupted my campaign for an investigation into the unjust enrichment of private corporations by officials at the CRTC.
Such is life.