The stereotype of a mentally ill person, each person derives from the social environment in which he or she grows up, and therefore the information contained therein varies from environment to environment. This information is usually much simplified, poor, anecdotal, although it is based on transmission from generation to generation. While the stereotype is a simplified mental image, it must be acknowledged that some of the information it contains is true. Generally speaking, changing the current stereotype of a mentally ill person, i.e. transforming views and bringing them closer to reality, is slow. There are many reasons for this phenomenon. The stereotypes of mentally ill people that exist in public opinion often describe their behaviour in an exaggerated way, portraying them as insane. They cover those deviations from the norm, which turn out to be incomprehensible to society, mainly due to the unclear intentions of the actor. The low relevance of the stereotype to reality, is expressed, among other things, in the fact that the characteristics attributed to a certain group of people are most often exaggerated and sharpened. Accordingly, in the case of the mentally ill, there may be a phenomenon of attributing to individual patients what we would consider normal and healthy in the same situation in other people. The general public's view of the mentally ill is based largely on the observation of the most severely ill, i.e. those in whom the disease process is unsuccessful, leading to a decline in mental performance and the perpetuation of pathological forms of behaviour. People who do not come into contact with the mentally ill often, when describing their behaviour, tend to emphasise features such as violent, aggressive, verbal and motor agitation. For many, the image of the mentally ill person as a crazy person, insane, unable to direct his or her own behaviour and displaying strange behaviour remains. Less frequently, however, characteristics such as sadness, depression, fear, anxiety and danger are indicated. The complexity of the stereotype is expressed in the number of traits and characteristics attributed to the group. Among the mentally ill, more characteristics are attributed to people with schizophrenia than to people with depression, for example. This is often due to the commonly perceived strangeness, otherness, otherness in the patient's behaviour. The presence of depressive symptoms such as apathy, sadness, a sense of hopelessness is less visible, because it does not contain an element of strangeness and externally corresponds more to the mental experiences experienced by healthy people.

The stereotypical approach to the sick person is directly related to intolerance towards mentally ill people. It means, very generally, a lack of acceptance, a disagreement with the type of behaviour that is considered bad, or with those views with which the subject is unwilling and unable to identify. Intolerance can be directed against people or against the evil that certain of their behaviours entail. The first case very often concerns people with mental health disorders; it is about undermining the rights of some people to their self-determination (and even their existence), often justified by social considerations.

Thus, a mentally ill person is someone who is particularly dangerous, threatening (our imagination suggests someone chasing after family or neighbours with an axe in their hand, or blowing up flats), capable of the most heinous crimes. We are not convinced by the statistics that mentally ill people do not commit any more crimes than others, in fact quite the opposite, only that they usually do so more openly and for motives that are often incomprehensible to those around them. We fail to see that establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between mental illness and crime is the simplest but false explanation for the presence of evil in the world.

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Unfortunately, the increase in information about mental illness is not accompanied by understanding and deeper reflection. Changing the prevailing stereotype of a mentally ill person, and therefore transforming views, bringing them closer to reality, is slow. There are many reasons for this. On the one hand, the stereotype depicts the sick person in an exaggerated way, often including those deviations from the norm that are incomprehensible to society. On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that mental illness is a reality that is difficult for a healthy person - the family - to understand, let alone for people who are in further contact with the sick.