Difficult Conversations: Addressing Inadvertent Mental Illness Discrimination

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Stone, Patton, Heen) has taught that people with specific mental illnesses were more difficult than others. The authors are considering an update to the 3rd Edition (2023) after being approached by a mental health advocate with bipolar disorder. This page shares resources to help teachers address this harmful aspect of the book.

Case Study: Realizing the Need to Update the Book

Dan Berstein, a mediator living with bipolar disorder, stumbled across a problem with the Difficult Conversations book after taking it home off the new releases shelf at his local library. This two-page case study tells the story of how this problem of a book describing people with mental health conditions like his as “more difficult” came to light and began being addressed. Click here to access it.

Five Adjustments to Difficult Conversation’s Question 3

The authors of Difficult Conversations have been very proactive in seeking feedback once the problem was alerted to them. A summary of the five key points from the memo shared by the Mental Health Safe Project’s Dan Berstein is available in this one-page guide to three issues to address to update question 3.

Moving Past Labels and Stigma About Mental Health

Inspired by the efforts to address inadvertent mental illness discrimination in Difficult Conversations, the Mental Health Safe Project prepared a one-page tool to help readers move away from harmful labeling. Click here to access it.

You can access more resources on our Preventing Mental Illness Discrimination in mediation page at www.mhsafe.org/preventing

Syllabus Review to Help Instructors

MH Safe works with professors to help them remove inadvertently discriminatory content from their syllabi and to have addendum content to help share best practices for addressing the harm. So far, we’ve informally helped people edit manuscripts, published books or content, course syllabi, etc (all for free). Soon we will use AI to scan to find the syllabi with known inappropriate content and automatically contact those professors/schools trying to work with them to update it. The preference would be for people who are conscientious about unconscious bias to opt in to this kind of review instead of waiting to be found without their participation.

Students or instructors can send their syllabi or questions to classreview@mhsafe.org

Get Involved

This work vetting guidance is new and evolving, and we can use all the help we can get. If you would like to get involved, please contact us