Severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia strike with a two-edged sword (Corrigan & Penn, 1997). On one side, the biological and psychosocial factors that affect the course of schizophrenia lead to psychotic symptoms, diminished social functioning, and d
psychology
Description
Severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia strike with a two-edged sword (Corrigan & Penn, 1997). On one side, the biological and psychosocial factors that affect the course of schizophrenia lead to psychotic symptoms, diminished social functioning, and depleted support networks. On the other, the stigma of severe mental illness leads to prejudice and discrimination. Stigmas are negative and erroneous attitudes about these persons. Unfortunately, stigma’s impact on a person’s life may be as harmful as the direct effects of the disease. As a result, various advocacy, government, and community-service groups believe that expunging stigma from societal discourse—replacing these negative stereotypes with accurate and more hopeful views of mental illness—will significantly enhance the quality of life of people with these disorders. These advocates promote a variety of strategies, including protest, which seeks to suppress stigmatizing attitudes of mental illness and behaviors that promote these attitudes; education, which replaces stigma with accurate conceptions about the disorders; and contact, which challenges public attitudes about mental illness through direct interactions with persons who have these disorders. Although these stigma-reduction strategies may hold promise in improving the lives of persons with severe mental illness, such interventions should not be accepted on faith. Rather, the theoretical assumptions and empirical support for these strategies should be closely examined. Social psychology and the study of social cognition, in particular, have generated useful models for understanding the functions of stereotypes and discrimination in ethnic and other minority groups. These models may help explain the stigma experienced by persons with severe mental illness as well as further the effectiveness of strategies that attempt to reduce it. In this article, we argue that efforts to reduce stigmatization of persons with severe mental illness will be strengthened by the use of theory and findings from the social psychology literature on stigma reduction for persons of ethnic minorities and other “out-groups.” This argument is reminiscent of an earlier appeal in this journal to better integrate the fields of social and clinical psychology (Leary & Maddux, 1987).
