Stigma vastly involves negative behaviour or discriminating attitude towards someone, based on their distinguishing characteristics such as a mental illness, health condition, or disability. And mental health stigma is one of the leading causes of worry for many in our country.
Many pieces of research and studies have shown that stigma is one of the leading risk factors contributing to poor mental health outcomes. It massively reduces the chances that a person who is suffering from a mental illness or trauma will receive appropriate and adequate care and treatment.
Woefully, the mental health stigma is still very common these days. As stigma is not only limited to mental conditions or attitudes towards psychiatric illnesses, social stigmas can also be related to other characteristics including gender, sexuality, race, religion and culture.
What are the types of mental health stigma?
Social Stigma
It includes the attitudes and behaviours people have around mental illness. Mental illness is not a topic that we openly talk about and most of the time we do so because we are fearful of society that what people will think of us? Or what will society say?
Related article- Reasons you should prioritise your mental health
Self-perceived Stigma
It involves an internalized stigma the person with the mental illness suffers from inside. Self-perceived stigma leads to an internalized shame about having a mental illness.
What are the impacts of Stigma?
The aftermath of stigma can be terrifying. The aftermath of Stigma includes a lack of understanding that is dreadful itself. Nut it also has various other effects such as feeling fear, anger, and intolerance directed at other people. People indulged with stigma are likely to experience:
- Poor lifestyle
- Terrible mental health
- Increased feelings of shame and self-doubt
- Social avoidance and Isolation from the society
- Lack of understanding between family and friends
How can we fight the Stigma and the situation better?
There are some things that you can do to help fight both social stigma and self-perceived stigma about mental illness.
Educate
Educate the people around you about social and self-perceived stigma. Use facts and figures in case you need them. Make people overcome the Harmful stereotypes of people with mental illness. More than 50% of people around the world suffer from some sort of mental illness and they don’t even have a clue about it. We should make people aware of it and tell them that it is common.
Mental health Issues to read up on
Being a listener
We have to be good listeners if we want to help. Listening helps people to find a comfort zone. If you will listen to the person who is suffering, you can get to know what are their struggles and what they are suffering from. So, you can appropriately help them.
Share stories of people who dealt with the same consequences.
Sharing stories of people in the same situations will help a lot. People will find a comfort zone if they will get to know about these stories that they are not alone, many people suffer from the same.
We should be conscious of our language.
Society stereotypes such as media depictions where the villain is often a character with a mental illness, Halloween costumes that depict people with mental illness as violent and dangerous, trying to showcase mental health issues as if tried harder people can overcome it or snap out of it. We should try to avoid all of these.
Choose empowerment over shame and be honest with the treatment.
If you are suffering from a stigma. You should seek help towards the matter without any shame. And you should be honest with the doctor about the treatment.
We should talk openly about these issues without any hesitation.
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It’s so important to use the right language – not just while talking but also listening to someone.
I guess social stigma is the root cause of self-decided stigma as well that adds more problems to the situation.
It’s a high time to fight with mental health stigma. If people accept it’s okay to be not okay sometimes then they will understand what other person is going through. Very well written post.
Totally agree with you Rakhi….we should talk about Mental health issues and support the people who are already going through the stigma.
Brilliant article. I had some mental health issues, what most people told me is to suck it up.
Thats a perfectly penned article..lover reading it. Its important to talk about mental illness. I strongly agree, its ok to not be ok
I am so glad you chose this topic. Building awareness around mental health is very critical. Thank you for being a soldier of this movement.
Mental Health Stigma needs to be dealt with, use of correct language and providing an empathetic listening ear is very important to support people
Mental health is considered as if something is not right with a person. What you said about Choosing Empowerment over Shame is very much needed. Also when we are listening to someone, our words, Jody language, and gestures play a big role.
Choose empowerment over stigma has stayed with me buddy can I agree more, love the piece
Last year has really highlighted the need for mental health. Thanks for sharing this post. Very informative.
Choose empowerment over shame, love how you put that. It’s so important to talk about stigma and get to the roots of it.
Yes agree Rakhi that mental health related issues are still carry a stigma in our society and people feel hesitate to talk about it freely. you have shared great pointers here to overcome this stigma. educate the people is one of the best option to make theme aware about the issues and also being good listener can also help a lot. with this small step, we can get to know what are their struggles and what they are suffering from. So, we can appropriately help them.
I am blessed because my mom and friends understand how important mental health is and going to psychologists is treated normal. It is high time that people start talking about the issues and give the seriousness it deserves. I hope everyone understands and come out openly.
Also, October is the month to spread depression and mental health awareness and it is important that all of us start voicing out and give mental health a priority just like physical diseases.
Acceptance of mental health is a big step towards tackling the issue. Whether it is friends and family or more. A lot of times we tend to ignore all these things which can be detrimental to one’s well-being. #MyepicaReads
A very well written and very important message to the person suffering and to those around him or her.I have always been very open and vociferous about my depression. Opening up helped me to overcome half my illness. I wish we could stop brushing it under the carpet.
Mental health issues have always been pushed under the carpet because of the stigma attached to them. We should have many more such positive and informative posts on the subject. Thank you for writing and sharing this
we all can bring awareness by spreading the message. It’s a great initiative from your side keep it up
You are absolutely right. Social and internalized stigma causes people to not seek help. We need more such conversations to remove the stigma.
“How can we fight the stigma and the situation” pointers under these are really good. It is the need of the hour that these things should be taken seriously and with the help of these, we can make our society a better one.
We need more people talking about this & spreading awareness. Just any other illness, mental well-being should be cared for. Thanks for bringing up this topic.
That’s well written topic and advices. Great post!
A Very important topic!
Very well written post. Actually mental illness is not taken properly in our society. Still people can’t accept it and that worsen the situation. I’m saying this from my personal experience.
Well said, Rakhi. If we remove the stigma around mental health and encourage open conversations around it, it would remove the stress and shame associated with it.
Your post is on point. One of the biggest roadblocks is getting proper support is the stigma around mental health. We need more such conversations to break this vicious cycle.
Thankfully more and more people are coming out and openly talking about mental health. While mental health as a stigma does exist, its great that the awareness has slowly but surely built up over the years.
I totally agree with you that there are still so many people in our society those who don’t want to talk about mental health and I like the way you have shared these tips about how to handle it is incredible.
The stigma around mental health issues is a sad reality. We must address it by encouraging conversations around it and consult professional help with no shame.
Gree. Mental health is so important. I’m glad that people are getting aware of such things now. Thanks to many bloggers like you.
In our society, we attach a social stigma to someone with mental health issue. No one tries to understand what that person might be going through both emotionally and physically but we’re quick to jump to conclusions. This attitude sucks and has got to change immediately.
It is the need to talk about mental health issues, and I feel one is going through it have to accept it and the person will power should be strong. I do face this but I tried my best to fight it. Though sometimes it get difficult then I shared it with my close ones. One needs to be a good listener to help us to come out from this issue
You have addressed right points and have given some useful tips to keep oneself mentally healthy.
We should not neglect mental health and should give importance to it just like physical health. This is a very important topic.
we should talk about Mental health issues and support the people who are already going through the stigma.
I think the stigma around taking medical guidance for mental health affects the patient even more. Also, it makes acceptance of the need to see an expert even more difficult for the patient.
We are living in times where everyone must Known and understand and openly discussion abdspeak about mental well being. We need to fight the stigma and deal with the issue openly.
Let alone mental. health, simple disability test for my kids took me forever. It needed a lot of coaxing for my family to accept that this is normal.
Time has come to speak about mental issues and society is accepting them now.
It’s good to read such a detailed post on this topic. We need more awareness in this regard
Mental health requires equal if not more care lile physical health. This was the perfect post addressing this relevent issue.
It’s a very important issue in the present times of stressful pandemic, which is taking an important stage and requires one to open up and tell someone where one can be helped.
The firs thing that should be ruled out when we talk about mental health is treating it a disease. Then only we will start talking about it openly.
Being vocal about mental illness is one side of the coin and understanding the issues of mental illness patiently without judging the person is another side. The sad part is talking about mental illness is still taboo in our society. But now, the time has come to volunteer the cause and spread awareness.
We need to normalize talking about Mental Health and also about seeking professional help to handle it better. The stigma surrounding it needs to go.
Exactly it is because of the stigma attached that the mental health gets neglected. You’ve done a great job bringing this to the fore we need to talk of this on all forums
Mental health issues are like any other health issue. However, it is sad that society associates so much stigma with mental health. People are not ready to acknowledge and get the proper treatment at the proper time owing to social stigma.
Mental health is often a rather ignored area of wellness, time to not see it as a stigma rather talk about it to the right people and ask for help..
I am glad more and more people are talking about this and fighting the stigma around it. It is indeed important to pay attention to our mental health as much as we pay attention to our physical health.
I believe that speaking up and keeping the doors of communication open can really help ease out mental health. You really need to get rid of the stigma attached to it because like any other illness it is also something which is affecting your mind and should be treated rightly without any biased opinion about it.