How Denmark Is Using Storytelling to Erase Stereotypes About Mental Illness

For Giuseppe Parlatore, shame has become intimately familiar. The feeling would wash over him anytime he revealed he had schizophrenia and people responded with fear. At a class reunion a few years ago a former teacher visibly recoiled at his diagnosis. “Oh, then you’re dangerous,” the teacher said.

It’s a reaction he wanted to disrupt, he told the New York Times, but how could he? What protest can be successfully lodged against someone who has already decided you’re no more than the worst stereotypes about your illness?

For a long while after his 2009 diagnosis, he existed the way the stereotype prescribes – “more or less a vegetable.” But he’s worked hard since, first to manage voices and reclaim his life, and then on a program from Denmark’s Ministry of Health – one that specifically needed people like him to challenge our biases against mentally ill people.

The program, One of Us, invites “ambassadors” with serious mental illness to share their personal stories with health care workers, law enforcement, and others – uplifting their humanity and, ultimately, destigmatizing mental illness.

The program’s design addresses concerns that general awareness campaigns don’t work, at least not in the long term. Posters, public service announcements and language guides build knowledge and sympathy, but research suggests that they rarely shift people’s underlying attitudes.

What does work, according to a 2022 analysis of 216 systematic reviews, is direct social contact. Meeting people with a mental illness while they’re not in crisis allows all parties to meet on equal footing, says mental health services researcher Sara Evans-Lacko, offering everyone the space to recognize their shared humanity.

And when ambassadors do talk about their worst experiences, it’s with a view to improvement. They speak plainly about their conditions and recovery, intentionally offering solutions people can apply to future encounters, said Anja Vedelsby, program manager for One of Us.

“Even if it’s a really bad story about encountering discrimination, ambassadors will always say, ‘I wish this had happened instead,’” she said.

The trainings are transformative for ambassadors and their audiences – sometimes especially for public professionals used to seeing mentally ill people in moments of crisis. Christina Philipsen, a social nurse at Amager and Hvidovre Hospital in Copenhagen, was, along with her colleagues admittedly “a little more strict and rough” with patients that made her nervous, like those with schizophrenia, worrying that their behavior might become unsafe.

But after hearing from several ambassadors who visited her hospital in 2023, she learned about their fear, and the dismissive treatment they’d experienced. It was typical for them to wake up in a hospital totally confused about what was happening and ask for clarity, only to be physically restrained in response. 

Likewise, police trainee Julie Andersen learned how critical it is to remain patient with people displaying signs of a crisis, repeating instructions if need be. More chances to listen can really help people with schizophrenia – their brains have to claw through a din of hurtful voices to focus on the one they should abide.

Having heard from ambassadors, Andersen reflected that “sometimes we can do a lot of harm, but we don’t always have to.”

Early data suggests that the One of Us program is working, but it’ll take time to see if the positive changes last. In the meantime, Parlatore already knows the work requires patience, persistence, and hope.

“I don’t feel like we’re losing the war,” he said. “It’s a generational project — at least for me.”