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The Stigma of Mental Illness - End of the Story? pp 3–28Cite as

On Revisiting Some Origins of the Stigma Concept as It Applies to Mental Illnesses

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Abstract

It is difficult to imagine a more successful concept than that of stigma. Over the past six decades, it has enjoyed a meteoric rise, moving from an obscure term to one that is evident not only in academic work but in common parlance. It has been applied to a massive number of circumstances ranging from race and ethnic differences to incarceration, sexual minority status, psoriasis, incontinence, and many more. In these circumstances, it has been useful to describe and help explain the shame, social awkwardness, rejection, misunderstanding, and exclusion that people in these situations experience. The concept has been elaborated to help bring to light different aspects of this complex array of circumstances, and researchers have developed a large set of measures to assess those processes. It has been used by those who have felt the afflictions of stigma to identify the psychosocial processes involved and thereby to muster resistance to them. Among all of the circumstances that are stigmatized, one of the most prominent and most studied has been that of mental illness. This chapter provides a selective history of the origins and development of the stigma concept as it pertains to mental illnesses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University, 722 West 168th Street, Room 1609, New York, NY, 10032, USA

    Bruce G. Link

  2. Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, Queen’s University, 21 Arch Street, Room 324B, Abramsky Hall, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

    Heather Stuart

  3. Department of Public Health Sciences, Mental Health Commission of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Heather Stuart

Authors
  1. Bruce G. Link
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  2. Heather Stuart
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Correspondence to Bruce G. Link .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Heinrich-Heine-University LVR-Klinikum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Wolfgang Gaebel

  2. Psychiatric University Hospital University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Wulf Rössler

  3. Association for the Improvement of Mental Health Programmes, Geneva, Switzerland

    Norman Sartorius

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Link, B.G., Stuart, H. (2017). On Revisiting Some Origins of the Stigma Concept as It Applies to Mental Illnesses. In: Gaebel, W., Rössler, W., Sartorius, N. (eds) The Stigma of Mental Illness - End of the Story?. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27839-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27839-1_1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27839-1

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