What Is Stigma?

Mental illness stigma is an issue that plagues many members of society. The consequences are not well known by the public and include, but are not limited to; family discord, job discrimination and social rejection (Feldman & Crandall, 2007). The most common stigma is the assumption every mentally ill person is dangerous to themselves and others. There are many conflicting articles both supporting and refuting this claim. There are many different ways to define stigma, but there are many common themes. Stigma is an attribute assigned to a person which sets them apart from others and casts them in a negative light (Link et al.; Byrne, 2000). This negative light leads to many other issues in a stigmatized person’s life. One is self confidence;

Therefore, they are more likely to commit violent acts. At the University of California, Berkeley there was a study done by Andres G. Martinez, Paul K. Piff, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Stephen P. Hinshaw on how ascribed humanity affects the perceived dangerousness of people with mental illness. It concluded that once the mental illness label was placed on someone, they were ascribed less humanity (Martinez, Piff, Mendoza-Denton, & Hinshaw, 2011). The “...targets may be animalistically dehumanized, in which they are rendered animal-like in terms of lacking such uniquely human qualities of constraint, complex emotional capacities, and refinement” (Martinez et al.). Stigma could be the reason that a majority of the public believes

“A common news account of mental illness, for instance, involves a sensationalized and violent crime in which an innocent person is killed by a mental health patient. The article is laced with graphic descriptions, emotional diction and a glaring headline. It also depicts the mentally ill person as devoid of social identity and dangerous, capricious, aggressive and irrational” (Fawcett, 2015). In prime time television “characters who were identified through behavior or label as having a mental illness were 10 times more likely than other TV characters to commit a violent crime – and between 10 to 20 times more likely to commit a violent crime than someone with a mental illness would be in real life” (Fawcett, 2015). Besides violence, there is also the inaccurate portrayal of mentally ill people never getting better. There is rarely ever a time where the recovery of a mentally ill person is shown. They often are not given any screen time that shows them integrated into society with jobs and friends (Fawcett,