On Describing and Seeking to Change the Experience of Stigma

Abstract

The stigma of mental illness has been shown to be a strong negative feature in the lives of many people with mental illnesses and their families. As a consequence it makes sense to undertake efforts to reduce the negative impact of stigma on the lives of people who experience it. In keeping with this idea we set out to develop and evaluate an intervention designed to encourage successful coping with stigma. Specifically, we constructed measures designed to assess the experience of stigma and to develop a pilot intervention designed to interrupt some of the negative consequences of stigma. To achieve this goal we studied people attending a clubhouse program, randomly assigning participants to intervention and control groups in the context of pretest-postest design. In a unique feature we also followed up the participants two year following the pre-test when all participants had the opportunity to experience the intervention. We found that people perceive and experience stigma and that these perceptions and experiences are associated low self-esteem and depressive symptoms. However, we found little evidence to suggest that the pilot intervention we mounted had a positive impact on any of the stigma measures we assessed, or on self-esteem or depressive symptoms. Our study contributes to the literature on stigma by providing refined measurement of the stigma experience but fails in terms of changing that experience in a manner that can be detected with our measures. The challenge of mounting efforts to reduce the consequences of stigma remains pressing.