Even the most open-minded people can have negative ideas about mental illness. As a result, people struggling with recovery face the additional barriers of fear and discrimination. This affects their basic human and civil rights to find jobs, housing and even a social network. While Connecticut's Dept. of Mental Health and Addiction Services acknowledges how hard it is to fight such deeply entrenched attitudes, the agency also knows the importance of trying.

Extensive research showed that once people look past labels and view mental illness as a human condition, their minds can get past the stigma of mental illness.

The "So if I said…" campaign starts a conversation from a new viewpoint of mental illness. The campaign normalizes the idea of mental illness, to give audiences a chance to reconsider why they attach labels and seek more information before discriminating.

Print ads and radio spots depicted people with mental illness asking questions such as, "So if I said I had a bad back instead of a mental illness, then could we carpool?" Or "So if I said I had migraines instead of a mental illness, then could we date?" The ads ask the final question, "Why is it that people living with all sorts of illnesses are treated differently than people living with mental illness?"