Discrimination and Mental Health

Mental Health and Stigma 1 Stigma influences the lives of people living with serious mental illnesses in many ways, including via the experience of self-stigma, whereby a person gives intense focus to what others might think about one’s own mental illness, internalizing their conception of the illness (Link, Wells, Phelan & Yang, 2015). Stigma can also come from society, from the workplace, from one’s own family or set of peers, and even from strangers.

When an illness is stigmatized in the media, a person who suffers from that illness may feel taboo, ostracized from society, isolated from the “normal” group of people who have normal lives and can function without problem (Corrigan, Druss & Perlick, 2014). Stigma influences the lives of people living with serious mental illnesses in other ways too. They become afraid to seek medical help because of the fear of being labeled as a person with a mental illness.

They become isolated from their communities as they try to hide their illness from others and thus just end up hiding themselves. They fear talking about it even with loved ones for fear of letting down those close to them. Because of this inability to communicate what is really wrong, they do not receive proper treatment and thus their mental illness becomes worse. Their work suffers and their careers can be lost (Corrigan et al., 2014).

People who suffer from mental illness might even try to deceive themselves about their illness, convincing themselves that they do not have it because that is the type of thing that only happens to other people. They try to live their lives as though there was nothing wrong and suppress the problem, bottling it up so that when there finally is a breakdown, it is exponentially worse that it would have been had they not suffered from the stigma of mental illness.

2 Stigma influences the lives of family members of person who are living with a serious mental illness. Family members of a person who are living with a serious mental illness may harbor biases and prejudices about the illness because of the stigma associated it. These stigmas are commonly rooted in ignorance and fear, however.

Nonetheless, people can hold these positions of prejudice because they have never learned the facts about the illness or they are afraid that be getting too close to the person they themselves might become stigmatized: they might worry whether others imagine that the illness runs in the family or that they too most likely have some element of the mental illness in their brains since they are related. It is like being guilty by association in their eyes (Flanagan, Farina & Davidson, 2016).

Stigma can also influence the lives of family members in the sense that they themselves begin to feel isolate and cut off from old friends and other peers who don’t understand how to help them cope with the situation. They may feel themselves getting fewer and fewer phone calls as their peers suffer from fear and ignorance about the actual nature of the illness. Stigma does not just affect the person with the mental illness but it can also be applied to those closest to the sufferer.

The illness is viewed like a bad case of measles or like leprosy. Everyone feels bad about it, but no one wants to get near to it because they are afraid of how they themselves might be negatively impacted.

The fact is that a person with a mental illness needs a strong support network and individuals who are not afraid of stigma because they have informed their ignorance can be the best of friends to individuals with a mental illness as was as to their family members, who also need support. One should be proud to help (Corrigan, Larson, Michaels et al., 2015).

3 Two strategies that have been developed to address the problem of stigma and mental illness in our communities are: 1) public education (Guruge, Wang, Jayasuriya-Illesinghe & Sidani, 2017), and 2) focusing on protecting the civil rights of persons with mental illness (Corrigan, 2016).

The strategy of public education includes teaching communities through a number of different venues—from school classes to conferences to productions in the media—on the ways in which people with mental illness are prejudiced against because of ignorance and fear, even though these people often receive care so that they can function adequately and effectively in their own daily lives and in society.

Education helps to erase the stigma that exists in society by reducing misguided or ignorant beliefs that are held by the public with regard to a particular mental illness. It helps to give concrete examples of what real world people with the illness are like and why they should not be discriminated against (Guruge et al., 2017). The strategy of promoting civil rights for persons with mental illness so that they are protected by law from discrimination is another means of helping to address the stigma issue.

Corrigan (2016) shows that this strategy has been particularly effective in Canada—more so than the education strategy—because it highlights the rule of law and supports the creation of legislation that would make it illegal for someone to act against a person with a mental illness because of the stigma associated with it. In other words, one way to address the stigma is to make it illegal for people to discriminate because of attitudes shaped by stigmatization.