I recently came across Manhattan Institute fellow Stephen Eide‘s 2020 article In Defense of Stigma in the online magazine National Affairs. It had some… odd… ideas about mental illness stigma, so I thought I would explore some of them. Okay, forget about exploring, I’m going to rant. The basic argument in the paper is that …
Is there a “right” way to talk about illness and disability? The current popular favourite is person-first language. It really got going in the 1990s, with the American Psychological Association leading the charge. Instead of talking about a “disabled person”, person-first language literally puts the person first, as in “person with a disability.” This has …
Is Person-First Language All It’s Cracked Up to Be? Read More »
One of the most common and damaging stereotypes about mental illness is that mentally ill people are chronically dangerous and violence-prone (Corrigan & Watson, 2002). This stereotype is especially strongly linked to people with psychosis. Like many stereotypes, it’s not true in the vast majority of cases, but the general public may not realize that. …
Last year I wrote about a police wellness check gone wrong, in which a young woman was dragged half-naked in handcuffs through her building by a police officer. While the woman was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, a story about the matter in the Kelowna Daily Courier used the word “arrested” multiple times, including …
Homelessness & Addiction: A Newspaper Embraces Stigma Read More »
People with mental illness can come up against stigmatized attitudes within mental health care, but having a mental illness diagnosis can also make it difficult to access appropriate care for physical health issues. A recent CBC News story provides an example of a man whose physical issues were written off because he was just a …
Just a Psych Patient? Mental Illness Stigma in the ER Read More »
Mental illness stigma is a very real problem. Those of us living with mental illness usually aren’t thrilled when people casually toss around mental illness diagnoses as adjectives, such as “she’s so bipolar”, “he’s so OCD”, or “everyone’s a little ADHD.” Yet, when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), all of a sudden there …
Stigma Is Bad… Except for Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Read More »
Patrick Corrigan has been an academic crush for a number of years now. And what is an academic crush, you might ask? I like how his mind works. He’s a psychologist and stigma researcher, with lived experience to boot. He’s one of the most prolific publishers in academic journals that I’ve ever come across. His …
The man in the photo below has a chain around his ankle, and he’s chained to the tree he’s leaning against. That’s his wife, and he has a mental illness. This photo, taken by photographer Robin Hammond, is in Ghana, but this doesn’t just happen there. I’m feeling rather grateful about living in Canada right …
Mentally Ill People In Chains: A Disturbing Reality Read More »
Recently, I came across a post that was a myths vs. facts type deal on mental illness stigma. One of the myths identified was that people with mental illness are disabled. The blogger’s response was that, on some days, mental illness could make it harder to work for some people, but there are also people …
Do Attempts to Sanitize Mental Illness Reduce Stigma? Read More »
I recently wrote about whether the wording “committed suicide” was likely to be an effective target for anti-stigma messaging. A commenter mentioned that in their home country, suicide was a crime up until quite recently. That got me curious, so I did some digging to find out where attempting suicide is illegal to this day. …
