Week 5 Stigmatization

Question 1

What is stigma?

Answer 1

• Stigma is a cultural mark that signals, reduces, and devalues a
  person with a condition from “whole and usual” to “tainted and
  discounted.”
• Stigmatized illnesses mean people are seen as “less than full”
  emanating from potential sources like individual failure.

Question 2

Stigmatization: Process and the Case
of Mental Health

Answer 2

“There is no country, society or culture where
people with mental illness have the same societal
value as people without mental illness.” (Rossler
2016)

Question 3

Components of the
stigmatization process

(Link and Phelan 2001)
process

Answer 3

1. Distinguishing and labeling
   differences
2. Associating differences
   from negative attributes
3. Separating “us” from
   “them”
4. Status loss and
   discrimination (in a power
   situation)

Question 4

Distinguishing and labeling
differences

Answer 4

• Most human differences are largely
  ignored (e.g., eye color), but there is a
  social selection for some differences that
  matter!
• Oversimplification of differences
• Label (affixed as a product of social
  processes)

Question 5

Associating differences
from negative attributes

Answer 5

• Labeled differences are linked to
  stereotypes (undesirable characteristics
  that form the stereotype)
• Empirical support from an
  experiment about rejections and
  perceptions of danger for people who
  were “former mental patients” versus
  “former back-pain patients” (Link et
  al. 1987)
• Stereotypes can go unnoticed because
  they can become “automatic” (cognitive)

Question 6

Separating “us” from
“them”

Answer 6

• The labeled stereotypes become a social
  way by which a separation of “us” versus
  “them” occurs
• Process by which people with a
  stigmatized label are thought to “be”
  solely the thing they are labeled
• Evidenced by some cultural use of a
  noun for stigmatized illnesses – “he’s
  a schizo” rather than “he has cancer”

Question 7

Status loss and
discrimination (in a power
situation)

Answer 7

• Person or groups of people with a
  stigmatized label experience status loss
  and discrimination
• The former 3 parts (labeled, set apart,
  and linked to undesirable characteristics)
  set a condition for devaluing and
  excluding them
• Fundamentally dependent on power
  relations (e.g., internalized stigma against
  others with similar conditions)

Question 8

Stats: Mental Health and Mental Illness in
Canada (CAMH)

Answer 8

By age 40, about 50% of the Canadian population will have or
have had a mental health problem.

• Major depression affects approximately 5.4% of the Canadian
  population, and anxiety disorders affect 4.6% of the population
• Eating disorders affect approximately 1 million Canadians,
• Rate for women is 10 times that of men
• Highest rate of mortality of any mental illness
• About 4,000 Canadians died by suicide in 2019
• Rate for Indigenous people is 3 times that of non-Indigenous
• 70% of mental health problems have their onset during childhood
  or adolescence

Question 9

How do people respond to stigma?

Answer 9

STIGMA COPING

*  Secrecy (concealing labeling info)

*  Education (providing information to
counter stereotypes)

*  Withdrawal (avoiding potentially
rejecting situations)

*  Challenging (direct and active
confrontation of stigmatizing
behaviour)

*  Distancing (cognitive separation
from stigmatized group)