March 30 is World Bipolar Day. I’ve written about this before. This year, I began to wonder, did World Bipolar Day have any real-world impact? There are many stated goals for World Bipolar Day, but have we made any progress towards those goals, and has any of that progress been made since World Bipolar Day itself? Do awareness days do anything for anyone?
Goals of World Bipolar Day
World Bipolar Day began on March 30, 2014. March 30 was chosen as it was Vincent Van Gogh’s birthday and people posthumously diagnosed him with bipolar disorder.
(Of course, people have also diagnosed him postmortem with schizophrenia. It’s impossible to accurately diagnose someone who lived in the 19th century using today’s criteria. It’s interesting that professionals, quite rightly, refuse to diagnose people who aren’t their patients today, and yet no one bothers to do it with a dead person. digression.)
World Bipolar Day was brought to life by several organizations: the International Bipolar Foundation, the International Bipolar Society and the Asian Bipolar Network. The International Bipolar Foundation shares the vision of World Bipolar Day is to:
. . . raising public awareness of bipolar disorders and eliminating social stigma. Through international cooperation [sic] The goal of World Bipolar Day is to bring information about bipolar disorders to the global population that will educate and improve awareness of the illness.
(I’d rather focus on treatment dollars, equal access legislation, disability rights, and other bi-polar life-related issues, but that’s me.)
What are people doing for World Bipolar Day?
World Bipolar Day is now recognized by many organizations, including Canada’s National Institute of Mental Health and Health. You will see information about this in the media and calls to action from various organizations. Advocates like myself use this as an excuse to share real life stories with bipolar disorder and factual information about the illness. Social media is usually full of World Bipolar Day information, hashtags and there are many question and answer sessions happening on that day.
Does World Bipolar Day impact the lives of people with bipolar disease?
It won’t surprise you to learn that many people with bipolar disorder (not to mention everyone else) have no idea this day exists. Not everyone with bipolar disorder is connected to advocacy efforts online or anywhere else. They just live their lives. This is at least partly because the media does not give it the same attention as other illnesses, despite the fact that more than 2% of the population has this serious mental illness.
That said, the fact that World Bipolar Day has been celebrated every year since 2014 shows that visibility has increased. Now, there are all kinds of efforts that take place on that day, including the movie starts like this.
Does visibility help anyone though? I suspect the answer to that is yes. People tend to fear what they do not understand and information increases understanding. Focusing on real people with bipolar disorder also addresses the issues that arise when a person does not (knowingly) come into contact with anyone with the illness. While I’m not a big fan of pointing to famous people and saying, “Look mom, they have bipolar!I suspect it changes the way some people view the disease.
All of this translates to perhaps little impact. There is frankly no evidence that I know of that general awareness campaigns make a measurable difference to the lives of people with mental illness. Some people talk about them, yes. But that’s it. Talking about an issue isn’t negative, but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle on legislation, diagnoses, access to care, research money, etc. I recognize that success is really hard to measure, but I see no evidence that stigma, late diagnosis, burden of disability or premature death rates have been positively affected over the past 12 years.
Do awareness campaigns of any kind help people with illnesses?
Interestingly, some disease-related awareness campaigns have evidence of success. Examples of this include:
The campaigns above improved things like screenings, diagnoses and prescription fills.
It seems to me that these campaigns have a proven track record of success as they motivated people act. Awareness, in the form of knowledge, is simply not enough. People know what HIV is – what people have to do is get it tested for that. An action-based campaign for people with mental illness may also be more effective.
What will you do about the impact of bipolar disorder?
So maybe what we can do is focus on action every day. Yes, World Bipolar Day can be a great reminder and excuse to spread information, but if that information is focused on action that day and every day, maybe we can improve the lives of people with bipolar disorder just a little bit more.
