On November 5, Glenn Close stopped in on PBS professor Olaf Sporn's P457 seminar, "The Connected Brain," as part of her trip to the campus to raise awareness of mental illness and combat the stigma that surrounds it. Accompanied by IU sociologist Bernice Pescosolido, who studies stigma and mental health, the class visit followed her large public lecture at the Whittenberger Auditorium. Sporns’ course is one of the 2013 Themester course offerings related to “Networks in a Complex World” and the discussion started with a question of how social networks might or might not help raise awareness and combat stigma.
Undergraduate Senior Elliot Layden asked a question on whether
knowledge of the physical or organic causes of mental illness might help to
reverse its stigma. Close responded with an anecdote that suggested it might
not.
On a visit to a graduate neuroscience lab at a large, prestigious
university, she spent some time with the graduate students in the lab. One
woman in particular had stood out as a really articulate, star student among
them. When Close got up to go to the bathroom, the woman followed her out and
came up to her weeping. She told Close that she suffered from serious
depression and could never divulge this to others in the lab or she would lose
their respect and her standing in the lab.
Sporns further explored the issue, pointing out the way such “organic
or physical causes” themselves have complex relationships to the world in which
they exist. Social experience, including the experience of being stigmatized, can
affect and alter brain chemistry and function. He called attention to the work
being done on embodiment that reveals the complex way in which the physical
structures and functions of the brain respond to and are shaped by social and
environmental phenomena.
Pescosolido added to this with the notion that for this reason, it was
necessary for many fields to come together to tackle the topic: neuroscientists
and psychologists, anthropologist and sociologists, to name a few. No single
view can capture the complexity of mental illness and stigma.
“We are now trying to work together,” she explained, “so we can see how
the brain, how social relationships, how different social contexts all work
together in terms of changing the brain, changing people’s lives, because we
now know it’s very complex. We now know all of those things are working
together in concert.”
