Schizophrenia Stigma

I am a biology major, so I have chosen to read from Medical Anthropology Quarterly, which is a  journal that publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. 

If you want to know what medical anthropology is, you can check out the Wikipedia entry, but it's "citation may be unclear", so as usual, use at your own risk. But basically medical anthropology looks at health and disease in humans and populations from a more holistic and cross-cultural perspective than usual medical studies do. 


The study that I chose to read about is called "Stigma Despite Recovery".  This study identifies the strategies used by people with schizophrenia-related illness to resist the social stigma associated with their disorder and addresses the experiences that they must go through everyday. In the study, 96% of the participants reported experiencing some sort of social stigma due to their disorder.


This study is considered to be significant right now because a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs has allowed people with schizophrenia and other related disorders to carry on more "normal" lives and keep their psychotic episodes to a minimum. 

The title of the study, "Stigma Despite Recovery" refers to the idea that the patients have begun to recover/have recovered from their schizophernia, thanks to the new drugs, but these people still have a social stigma surrounding their mental illness.

Some of the common strategies found to avoid social stigma are:

• Concealing diagnosis or medications
• Avoiding others 
• Attempting to pass for normal
• De-emphasizing the illness 
• Educating others about mental illness 
• Confrontation and opposition
• Humor and joking
• Socializing with others with mental illness or those who sympathize 

Each strategy to avoid social stigma can be considered beneficial or detrimental, based on the situation.  But I think that the most interesting strategy is known as "reproduction of stigma".  This is when people with schizophrenia make a clear distinction between themselves and others with similar illnesses in order to keep themselves from being included in the "mentally ill" category. I think this is interesting because those people that are reproducing the stigma are also the ones who are trying to avoid stigma themselves.  The whole thing is just a vicious cycle, really.  People are always going to compare themselves to others that are "lower" or "sicker" than them in order to make themselves feel better.