What is stigma?

Claire Henderson: If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s really like a mark, the idea of a mark that distinguished people as having some attribute that was denigrated, so that they might become an outcast or excluded in some way. So that’s really what it means in terms of the dictionary definition.  In terms of mental health problems it’s very problematic – we use it a lot to talk about what people experience when they have a mental health problem. But a lot of people don’t like the term, partly because it suggests that there is something that’s visible, about them, which is a problem – whereas a lot of the problem actually comes from people’s behaviour towards them. So it locates the problem in the wrong place, and in a way we prefer more and more to talk about discrimination towards people on the basis of mental health problems. 

Research suggests that the experience of discrimination is pretty much the norm, it is so widespread. There’s an international study, which just involves people with schizophrenia, which suggests this – that the vast majority have experienced discrimination in some way, in some area of life.  Similarly, there’s a study we are doing at the moment called Viewpoint, which is an annual survey of people receiving mental health services – so not just schizophrenia – and again 90 per cent had experienced discrimination in some area of life.  We ask about a whole range of life areas – so discrimination from friends, family, neighbours, as well as what one typically thinks of in terms of discrimination, for example, by an employer or something.  So we can see this quite broadly. 

What role does the media have to play?

A big and complicated one I think! There are a number of problems in terms of media reporting I guess, one is just what they decide to cover – so for example, if they only cover stories about violence committed by people with mental health problems, that would be the stereotype, ‘that’s what people with mental health problems do’. But obviously they don’t, they cover a much wider range of stories – but there are other kinds of stories which also perpetuate other stereotypes, or perpetuate the ignorance or misinformation if you like. A lot of the time language suggesting mental health problems – like ‘psycho’ or ‘schizo’ or whatever will be used in the absence of any factual information that someone has a mental health problem. So that’s the way the association between violence and mental health problems is exaggerated, because there’s an assumption that somebody was in an abnormal state of mind – so you see ‘crazed killer’ or something – so that makes a link I think in people’s minds between mental illness even when there was no factual evidence that there was one. 

I think that the basic problem is that people with mental health problems as a discriminated against group... it just hasn’t been recognised in the same way as, for example, race or sexuality or gender has been recognised as a human rights issue.