Stigma and mental disorder: phenomena and terminology

My aim in this paper is to examine the application of the concept stigma to mental disorder and to the mentally ill. I believe that the loose use of this term serves to obscure the real issues that must be confronted in attempting to change public response to mental disorder. I shall examine recent, and in my opinion ill-advised, use of the concept stigma and then present some data that bear upon social responses to mentally ill patients and former patients in contemporary America. My data are derived from a long-term study of mental patients and their families, and I shall document that their feelings of stigmatization are not so much a consequence of the response of others to their having been hospitalized for mental illness or labeled mentally ill as of self-doubts or chronic manifestations of mental illness.