Stigma is a perceived negative attitude or perception about anything that causes people to devalue the other person and develop negative mindset against them. In other words, stigma can also be regarded as portrayal of discrimination and hatred towards a specific group of the community. People suffering with mental illness like depression, anxiety or schizophrenia are often victims of discrimination and stigma due to wrong notions about mental issues among people. Apart from the daily challenges in a mentally ill patient’s life due to disabilities and symptoms of mental illness, the experience of stigma further increases the suffering for people. This has a major impact on all the factors that define a quality life for people such as good housing, good job, good social relationship and satisfactory health care service (Corrigan et al. 2012). This essay further explores the topics of stigma and discusses the impact of stigma on people with mental illness. It also reviews mental health website that gives idea of any anti-stigma campaigns and demonstrates the manner in which the strategies adopted for the campaign are in line with stigma prevention strategies mentioned in research literature.
The experience of stigma linked to mental illness act as a major barrier in the recovery of people with mental disorder. Instead of reducing the challenges in patient’s life, stigma further leads to complication and poor mental health outcome in patient. For instance, Lazowski et al. (2012) had demonstrated that people with mood disorder or personality disorder are socially stigmatized in society because there is a perception that such individual are incapable to take decision and they are dangerous to public. The study evaluated stigma experience in people with mood disorder revealed that people with mood disorder mostly had psychosocial impact from experiences of stigma (Lazowski et al. 2012).
Another research literature showed that not only common public, but mental health professionals and family members also have negative stigtamitizing attitude towards people with mental illness. It results in feelings of shame and helplessness in affected people. Affected people starts to internalize stigma too as they believe that people discriminate them because they really have certain limitations. Patients who were more concerned with stigma were also found to have impaired social adjustment after 7months compared to those who did not regarded stigma to be affecting their lives. The importance of the research was that it gave the insight that Inventory of Stigmatizing Experiences (ISE) tools can be useful to quantify stigma experience in patients and determine to what extent people are affected by it (Mileva,Vázquez and Milev 2013). This will support developing successful strategies to mitigate stigma as the tool will gives crucial idea about how patients perceive stigma.
The review of research studies also showed that mental illness related stigma has an impact on help seeking behavior of patient and engagement with mental health care service. Stigma is constructed by means of public, self as well as structural component. As stigma is a social construction, culture of people also has an impact on acceptability of stigma and seeking care for it. Health care disparities also have an impact on participation of patient in mental health care service. Poor cultural competence in staff leads to feelings of alienation in patient and lack of trust in staffs. The family perception of devaluing people with stigma also results in diminished coping and poor motivation to seek support of mental health care service (Corrigan, Druss and Perlick, 2014). This evidence indicates that stigma is moderated by knowledge of mental illness and cultural contest of patient. Many family engagement campaigns and cultural competence strategy within mental health care is needed to mitigate the adverse effect of stigma on care seeking.
Ayenalem, Tiruye and Muhammed (2017) pointed out that stigma associated with mental illness is one of the reason for lower quality of life in mentally ill patients. Although stigmatization is mainly perceived to be done by the public, however self-stigma also exists which significantly hampers overall well-being of people with mental illness. The study tried to evaluate about extent of self-stigma and quality of life in people by means of Internalized Stigma on Mental Illness scale and quality of life assessment tool respectively. The study result showed that high prevalence of self-stigma was associated with poor quality of life in patient. Considering this evidence, it can be concluded that mental health professional should also focus on improving social life of patients instead of just focusing on medical management of symptoms.
From the review of research evidence on the impact of stigma on people with mental illness, the importance of making policy changes and developing anti-stigma strategies is understood. Currently, many campaigns has been implemented to mitigate stigma and improve health and quality of life in people with mental illness. One of the contemporary mental health website ‘www.beyondblue.org.au’, also gave an idea about the ‘Say no to stigma!’ campaign, a SAN Australia initiative which aimed to mitigate stigma against mental illness by means of You Tube video campaign. This video campaign gave a platform to all patients with mental illness their carers and famiy members to express in their own words experiences of stigma and its impact on their lives. The main purpose behind this video series was to make public aware abut the negative impact of stigma through personal stories of people affected by mental illness (Beyondblue.org.au. 2017). It also clarifies regarding some misconceptions related to stigma in the workplace and economic impact of exclusion and stigma on people. This kind of strategies can be successful in changing the attitude of common public towards mental illness. This is also similar to the strategy mentioned by Taghva et al. (2017) which regarded emphasis on education and changing attitudes as one of the necessary strategy to reduce stigma towards mentally ill patient. Hence, it demonstrates that people involved in launching social media campaigns are using evidence based strategy to plan and implement anti-stigma strategies. The use of You Tube as a platform in the ‘Say no to stigma’ campaign was important because as it clarify people regarding the etiology of mental disorder and removes many misconceptions related to mental illness.
The above anti-stigma campaign launched by SANE Australia strategy is also in alignment with the strategy proposed by Naslund et al. (2014) as the study showed using social media as a tool to share illness and stigma experience act as a platform to naturally arrange for peer support for people with mental illness. This inference was given after reviewing the impact of YouTube uploads of people with severe mental illness on attitude of public. The video was found to minimize sense of isolation in patients and find support through peer exchange. Hence, the use of YouTube as a platform in the ‘Say no to stigma!’ campaign is considered to be effective as it follows the strategies provided by the above evidence and uses social media as a useful tools to reduce stigma. Sharing videos can encourage getting comments from people already living with mental illness and they may share useful knowledge to mentally ill patients regarding coping with day-to-day challenges of mental illness and seeking mental health care at the right time. Getting access to authentic accounts of impact of stigma on these people can changes the mind of public and help them empathize with mentally ill patients. Another significant benefit of the strategies use in the ‘Say no to stigma’ campaign is that it increases contact with people already experiencing severe mental illness and evidence shows that such contact is critical to reduce stigma (Thornicroft et al. 2016).
The essay summarized about the devastating impact of stigma and discrimination on health and recovery of mentally ill patients. The psychosocial impact of stigma is huge on patients and policy related changes and public education is crucial to mitigate stigma. The essay discussed about the usefulness of ‘Say no to stigma’ campaign and showed how the strategy is in alignment with anti-stigma strategies mentioned in research literature. Social media can be effectively used in these campaigns to mitigate stigma and maximize peer support for mentally ill patient.
Reference:
Ayenalem, A.E., Tiruye, T.Y. and Muhammed, M.S., 2017. Impact of Self Stigma on Quality of Life of People with Mental Illness at Dilla University Referral Hospital, South Ethiopia. American Journal of Health Research, 5(5), pp.125-130.
Beyondblue.org.au. 2017. ‘Say no to stigma!’ is the focus of SANE Australia’s new campaign Retrieved 3 December 2017, from https://www.beyondblue.org.au/connect-with-others/news/news/2013/08/26/say-no-to-stigma-sane-australia’s-new-campaign
Corrigan, P.W., Druss, B.G. and 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), pp.37-70.
Corrigan, P.W., Morris, S.B., Michaels, P.J., Rafacz, J.D. and Rüsch, N., 2012. Challenging the public stigma of mental illness: a meta-analysis of outcome studies. Psychiatric services, 63(10), pp.963-973.
Lazowski, L., Koller, M., Stuart, H. and Milev, R., 2012. Stigma and discrimination in people suffering with a mood disorder: a cross-sectional study. Depression research and treatment, 2012.
Mileva, V.R., Vázquez, G.H. and Milev, R., 2013. Effects, experiences, and impact of stigma on patients with bipolar disorder. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 9, p.31.
Naslund, J.A., Grande, S.W., Aschbrenner, K.A. and Elwyn, G., 2014. Naturally occurring peer support through social media: the experiences of individuals with severe mental illness using YouTube. PLOS one, 9(10), p.e110171.
Taghva, A., Farsi, Z., Javanmard, Y., Atashi, A., Hajebi, A. and Noorbala, A.A., 2017. Strategies to reduce the stigma toward people with mental disorders in Iran: stakeholders’ perspectives. BMC psychiatry, 17(1), p.17.
Thornicroft, G., Mehta, N., Clement, S., Evans-Lacko, S., Doherty, M., Rose, D., Koschorke, M., Shidhaye, R., O’Reilly, C. and Henderson, C., 2016. Evidence for effective interventions to reduce mental-health-related stigma and discrimination. The Lancet, 387(10023), pp.1123-1132.
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