Stigma Around Mental Health

Written by Mehrun Nisa, Edited by Izzy Saraza

The student must have failed his math exam. He doesn’t have a mountain of homework, he only has a single test to look forward to. He hands it to his mom, who waits for him, visibly expectant yet passive. Her disappointment is palpable. Their collective thought is that we don’t get anything in return for all that effort we put into sleepless nights and crying clock.

The mother’s explosion comes no surprise, of course. This time, we are ready for takeoff: “You are a failure once again.” Her voice trembles, her body emotionally charged.

The mother unleashes all her fury, unfiltered and raw. His searing emotions are keeping him from being able to contain them and he runs straight to the seclusion of his room. Expectation is now a thousand pound weight that makes him claustrophobic and the world existentially escapable. Screaming… into the silence of one’s room, face buried in his knees, with a contorted body, the only thing that can be heard is screaming…

The mother is a mystery: “I didn’t ask for any of this.” Stigma around mental health often begins in moments like these. Societal rejection, denial and emotional neglect is inevitable and once this individual view is experienced, it is bound to get significantly worse.

It’s not exclusive to doctors in therapy sessions or clinics. It rather exists in the social environment such as schools, homes and groups.

There are several types of stigma where we can define these as self-stigma, public stigma, and structural stigma. Self stigma is an attributing form where the individual takes in the hard stance of society on mental health. It's not just 'feeling bad' — it's a deep collapse of self esteem, pretending to be indolence or a lack of initiative.

Often, mental health problems in the younger population go along with labeling, isolation, exclusion, and more intellectualized forms of emotional abuse. Instead of empathy there is often blame: “toughen up” or “just suck it up.” This can cause irreversible harm.

Developmental Intergroup Theory (DIT) helps us to capture early life contexts of this stigma. It provides an explanation of the way in which the development of biases occurs among children and adolescents concerning categorization with social cues and group identities. Children don’t inherently stigmatize mental health; they stigmatize it because they see what adults do, what they hear in the media, and what they see others doing. With age, it becomes clearer to children how others see them. Added risk: Negativity about mental health in adolescence, when identity is being formed, peer pressure is at a premium, and feelings are fickle. When peers do things like make fun of or push someone away for why they go to counseling or why they ‘act weird,’ this is precisely the stereotypes that society has taught them to employ. Stigma is not just a word; it is a reality. It’s one that isolates, silences and shames many young individuals. We must first understand how stigma begins and spreads among children and teens with mental health challenges to support the development and integration of these children and teens. Mental health stigma should be studied in the context of developmental science as suggested by Heary et al. (2017). Thus we can develop interventions that help the individual and change the environment around. Education, empathy and a willingness to hear without judgment is the first step in breaking the stigma. With the society starting to talk openly about mental health, we start to change the story, from a story of shame to a story of support.

The first steps to breaking the stigma are education, empathy and willingness to listen without judgment. That story changes as we talk about mental health as a society and turn it from a story of shame to a story of support.

References

Heary, C., Hennessy, E., Swords, L., & Corrigan, P. (2017). Stigma towards mental health problems during childhood and adolescence: Theory, research, and intervention approaches. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26(10), 2949–2959. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0829-y