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).
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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.
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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).
Corrigan, P. W., Druss, B. G., & Perlick, D. A. (2014). The impact of mental illness stigma on seeking and participating in mental health care. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 15(2), 37-70.
Corrigan, P. W., Larson, J. E., Michaels, P. J., Buchholz, B. A., Del Rossi, R.,Fontecchio, M. J., ... & Rüsch, N. (2015). Diminishing the self-stigma of mental illness by coming out proud. Psychiatry Research, 229(1), 148-154.
Corrigan, P. W. (2016). Lessons learned from unintended consequences about erasing the stigma of mental illness. World Psychiatry, 15(1), 67-73.
Flanagan, E., Farina, A., & Davidson, L. (2016). Does Stigma Towards Mental Illness Affect Initial Perceptions of Peer Providers?. Psychiatric Quarterly, 87(1), 203-210.
Guruge, S., Wang, A. Z. Y., Jayasuriya-Illesinghe, V., & Sidani, S. (2017). Knowing so much, yet knowing so little: a scoping review of interventions that address the stigma of mental illness in the Canadian context. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 22(5), 507-523.
Link, B. G., Wells, J., Phelan, J. C., & Yang, L. (2015). Understanding the importance of “symbolic interaction stigma”: How expectations about the reactions of others adds to the burden of mental illness stigma. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 38(2), 117.
