"Even Heroes Get Depressed": Sponsorship and Self-Stigma in Canada's Mental Illness Awareness Week.

Abstract

In 1992, the Canadian Psychiatric Association launched Canada's first national campaign against mental illness, Mental Illness Awareness Week (MIAW). I stress that pharmaceutical sponsorship of the first five years of MIAW (1992-1997) was integral to shaping the trajectory of the campaign and marks a shift in the way stigma is conceived and resisted in Canada: what was an interpersonal process based on social norms becomes refigured as "self-stigma," or an individualized process in which lack of information, education, and self-assessment contribute to an inability to consider oneself as at-risk for a disease, condition, or disorder.