Julie Andersen, a student at the Danish Police Academy, said the ambassadors had taught her what it was like to try to comply with an officer’s instructions while voices are drowning them out. One ambassador read a story, while at the same time playing a recording of the voices she heard in her head — the running insults and interruptions. It felt, Ms. Andersen said, like an impossible cacophony. And it helped her realize that, while policing, she needed to slow down — repeating herself, checking for understanding, being more patient — and not just default to anger and force.
“Sometimes we can do a lot of harm,” Ms. Andersen said, “but we don’t always have to.”
A different kind of recovery
Stigma tends to flow from stereotypes to prejudice to discrimination, Dr. Corrigan said, and social contact can help break this cascade. But society’s contempt can also become internalized, as people with mental illness begin to doubt their worth and blame themselves.
That self-stigmatization, Dr. Corrigan said, can turn people into echo chambers of shame, feeding thoughts like: “Why should I even try to get a job? Somebody like me is not worth it. Why should I even try to live on my own? Somebody like me is not capable.”
But serving as an ambassador might help, Dr. Evans-Lacko said, empowering people with mental illness to tell their stories.
Pernille Petersen, 48, said she had been committed to psychiatric wards more than 100 times because of her mental health challenges: She has been given diagnoses, at various times, of schizophrenia, a personality disorder, an anxiety disorder and an eating disorder. For a decade, she lived in a long-term-care facility, where the staff told her that she would not get better — that she should vacuum, do the dishes and stop expecting more. “All hope was out for me,” Ms. Petersen said.