Destigmatization Strategies Research Articles

Mental health literacy for public employees

PurposeAlthough mental disorders are common in the workplace, they often go unnoticed. There is frequently a gap in the recognition and effective management of these disorders, leading to delayed recovery and worsening conditions. This study evaluates the level of Mental Health Literacy (MHL) among employees of the Finance and Planning Departments in the Federal District, Brazil, and proposes preventive measures and de-stigmatization strategies for mental health in the workplace.MethodsMHL among active employees was assessed using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (MHLS), developed by O’Connor and Casey (2015) and validated for Brazilian Portuguese by Buta et al. (2024). The data analysis included descriptive and inferential statistics, with nonparametric tests used to compare MHL across different groups.ResultsThe results showed that 27.6% of participants had adequate literacy, 67.9% had problematic levels, and 4.5% had inadequate levels. Women were observed to have higher literacy levels than men. Additionally, significant variations in literacy levels were noted among individuals with different health conditions; those diagnosed with cancer, depression, or other illnesses had higher literacy than those without diagnosed conditions.ConclusionTo address MHL challenges, educational actions such as awareness campaigns, training, and consultancy programs are essential.

Platform-mediated territorial stigmatization and destigmatization: Unpacking Reddit discussions on moving to “the other” London

This paper interrogates the role of digital platforms in advancing territorial stigma. Drawing from research that has discerned the channels with which territorial stigma has been produced and mediated through — commonly referred to as ‘modes’ — I argue digital platforms are a mode in their own right. Digital platforms are on par with, and may have already surpassed, pre-platform media modes (e.g., newspapers, television) in terms of their use for forming preconceptions of cities in lieu of lived experience. Accordingly, this study investigates discussions on the social networking platform Reddit, about moving to the mid-sized city of London, Ontario in Canada. I use a hybrid thematic analysis to identify (de)stigmatizing content within a topic-based forum (a subreddit). The results show that the platform mediated its users’ reproduction of territorial stigmas stemming from pre-platform modes, rather than having generated entirely novel stigmas. Moreover, many users enacted or reworked established territorial destigmatization strategies to contest, counter, or cope with London’s territorial stigma. This paper contributes to territorial stigma research by examining a lesser-known mid-sized city, which in turn expands the current understanding of stigmatization in Canada hitherto limited to its materialization in large cities. By demonstrating Reddit’s modal potentiality, the paper provides the necessary empirical basis for future studies interested in examining other digital platforms through the theoretical framework of territorial stigma. Furthermore, it encourages future conceptualizations of the media mode of territorial stigma production to include digital platforms alongside traditional and mass media.

Getting out and giving back: repertoires of destigmatization in the private social safety net

Abstract Receiving assistance can be stigmatizing. As the cash welfare rolls have fallen to near-historic lows, the privatization of the social safety net in many states has brought up new questions about how recipients of assistance meet their material needs without sacrificing their sense of dignity. I draw on 15 months of ethnographic observation and 44 interviews with social service recipients in two majority Black neighborhoods in Houston, Texas to explore how they destigmatize their encounters with social service providers. I find that service recipients primarily seek out organizations that will treat them with respect due to the stigma attached to receiving assistance. This stigma is both racialized and gendered, such that groups with identities congruent with negative stereotypes about welfare recipients—like Black women—see themselves at higher risk of stigmatization and therefore practice destigmatization strategies with greater frequency. I build on these findings by highlighting two repertoires of destigmatization that service recipients draw upon to access both material and symbolic resources simultaneously: getting out of their neighborhoods to receive services anonymously and giving back by volunteering at local organizations. In doing so, I highlight multiple pathways through which residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods move from stigmatization to destigmatization in the welfare system.

A Photovoice study of the struggle to secure child support for unmarried mothers: Focusing on destigmatization strategies

A Photovoice study of the struggle to secure child support for unmarried mothers: Focusing on destigmatization strategies

Navigating Stigma through Refashioning Islamic Veiling: Muslim Women’s Sartorial De-Stigmatization Strategies in Contemporary United States

This article examines Muslim women’s de-stigmatization strategies in everyday urban interactions in contemporary United States with a focus on their sartorial choices geared toward navigating stigmatization. It is particularly interested into how intersubjectivity, emotions and materiality work together in navigations of the quintessentially hybrid and unstable meanings of Islamic veiling. Within this frame, it demonstrates that Muslim women’s socio-spatial relations in the context of rising public hostility initiate socially creative processes of self-representation that are navigated through a broad range of sartorial practices. The article pays significant attention to the dialogic-material aspects of Muslim women’s self-presentations in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. It concludes that experimentation with sartorial styles provides veiled Muslim women a productive site to navigate the tensions between self-identifications and hegemonic other-identifications imposed from outside and experienced as powerfully stigmatizing. Yet, at times of political crisis marked by a striking rise of anti-Muslim hostility, the productive aspects of their sartorial management become obscure and futile.

The Effect of Psycho-education on the Affiliate Stigma in Family Caregivers of People with Bipolar Disorder.

IntroductionPaying attention to stigma among caregivers to provide proper care for patients is necessary, and promoting awareness (about mental illness and mental health) to taking care of the caregivers’ health, is crucial.ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the effect of psycho-education on the affiliate stigma in family caregivers of people with bipolar disorder.MethodThis study is a quasi-experimental research with an experimental and control groups. 64 family caregivers of people with bipolar disorder participated in this study (32 in each group). Data was collected using the demographic questionnaire and Affiliate Stigma Scale before and after intervention (with 4 weeks gap). The experimental group received a psycho-education program for four weeks. The control group carried on their normal routine lifestyle.ResultsThe mean scores of the affiliate stigma of both control and experimental groups before the intervention did not show a statistically significant difference (P = .36), however after the intervention the results were statistically significant and increased in the experimental group (P < .001).ConclusionAccording to the findings of this study psycho-education is an effective intervention that can reduce the affiliate stigma among family caregivers of people with bipolar disorder and it can be considered as one of the de-stigmatization strategies for them.

What works? Lessons from a pretrial qualitative study to inform a multi-component intervention for refugees and asylum seekers: Learning Through Play and EMDR Group Traumatic Episode Protocol.

Almost half of the trials failed to recruit their targeted sample size of which 89% could be preventable. Successful implementation of mental health trials in a context of forcibly displaced individuals can be even more challenging. Mental health difficulties have the potential to impact parenting skills, which are linked to poor development in children, while parenting interventions can improve parents' mental health and parenting behaviors. However, the evidence on parenting interventions for refugees is limited. A parenting intervention, Learning Through Play Plus Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Group Treatment Protocol, has been designed to address parental mental health. This pretrial qualitative study, conducted with refugees, asylum seekers and professionals, aimed to explore their perceptions of the intervention and to identify barriersand recommendations for better engagement, recruitment, and delivery. Three themes were generated from thematic analysis: the content of the intervention, suggestions for improvement and implementation, and understanding the role of the facilitator. These themes provided insights into the issues that might predict the barriers for delivery of the intervention and offered several changes, including destigmatization strategies to improve engagement.

Kurdish students’ perceptions of stigma and their destigmatization strategies in urban contexts in Turkey

ABSTRACT Contemporary literature has chiefly studied the Kurdish issue from a macro-political perspective. In this paper, we focus on ordinary Kurdish youth’s everyday responses to stigma and discrimination from the majority Turkish group and connect them to the macro-political context. Drawing on 29 qualitative in-depth interviews with Kurdish students in Izmir, we document that this group seeks to negotiate their belonging in the face of their characterizations as backward, terrorist, and disloyal. The findings suggest that these youth respond to stigmas, depending on contextual dynamics, by specific destigmatization strategies such as confronting, managing the self, assuming individual responsibility, and avoiding. We argue that ongoing armed conflict stigmatizes Kurds as separatists, and invisible markers between Kurds and Turks make hiding ethnicity the primary destigmatization strategy for Kurds.

Attitude toward psychiatry amongst medical students in Jeddah

Background: Mental illnesses are a significant public health concern. Thus this study aimed to better understand the general views of medical students in Jeddah toward psychiatry, the influences of other factors on those attitudes, and the likelihood of psychiatry specialization. Methods: A total of 844 medical students from six colleges in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, participated in this cross-sectional study. Students&amp;apos; attitudes toward psychiatry (ATP) were measured using the ATP-18 questionnaire. The association between students&amp;apos; attitude toward psychiatry with gender, nationality, monthly income, university, academic year, lecture evaluation, clinical evaluation, the likelihood of specializing in psychiatry, personal history of mental illnesses, relative/ friend with mental illness, and relative/ friend who is a psychiatrist were investigated. Results: The mean ATP-18 score was 62.22 (SD = 7.29), indicating that the students had a positive attitude toward psychiatry overall, but had a negative view of psychiatric patients. The participants&amp;apos; gender, monthly income, university, the likelihood of specializing in psychiatry, personal history of mental illness, history of relatives or friends with mental illness, history of relatives or friends who are psychiatrists, psychiatric clinical course, and lecture course evaluation were found significantly associated with ATP-18 scores. Conclusions: The students showed an overall favorable attitude toward psychiatry and an unfavorable attitude toward psychiatric patients. The presence of de-stigmatization strategies toward mental illnesses and psychiatric patients in the undergraduate academic curriculum of psychiatry could improve students&amp;apos; perspectives on mentally ill patients.

The influence of stigma on people with mental illness

People with mental illness have not only struggled with the psychological and physical symptoms of the disease but also suffered from social discrimination and prejudice. [1]This article expresses the negative impact of mental illness stigma on the stigmatized group through the study of previous literature. The purpose of this article is to improve the public’s stereotypes and prejudices of people with mental illness, so as to provide a basis for researchers to identify effective de-stigmatization strategies.

Sexy Work Not Sex Work: How Dirty Work Gets Clean

Research on stigma is often divided between areas focusing on organizational stigma and job-based stigma, also known as dirty work. The dirty work literature has made strides in outlining the various ways in which dirty workers cope with stigma, but, unlike the organization stigma literature, has not elaborated de-stigmatization strategies. Drawing on interviews with 33 women working in the burlesque and stripping segments of the exotic dance industry, we explore how dirty work can get clean. Our findings reveal the ways in which the stigma of dirty work is not only attached to the work and workers, as existing literature suggests, but to the organizations it takes place in, and the associated audiences and scripts linked to these organizations. We show that by shifting out of stigmatized organizations, finding new audiences, and developing new scripts, actors without resources or power can shed the stigma of their work. Our findings thus enable us to link the dirty work literature to organizational stigma literature by pointing out the important ways in which they are related, and how dirty workers can clean their work without changing the primary elements of it.

Place Narratives and the Experience of Class: Comparing Collective Destigmatization Strategies in Two Social Housing Neighborhoods

A growing body of literature has investigated the various ways in which residents of stigmatized neighborhoods respond to and cope with stigmatization. However, these approaches have fallen short in tackling the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization. In this article, I take seriously the question of context and, based on a comparative ethnography of two social housing neighborhoods in Finland, show how residents in similar social structural positions differed in terms of the cultural milieus they inhabited, presenting them with different cultural resources for dealing with stigmatization. In the article, I suggest that non-recognition is an understudied but significant consequence of stigma related to social housing neighborhoods. Further, I suggest that depending on the historical and cultural context of the neighborhood, different destigmatization strategies are employed when residents face non-recognition. My data shows that locally lived collective place narratives informed residents’ experiences of class: In one neighborhood, the defining element of the locally acknowledged place narrative was class struggle, whereas in the other it was middle-class aspiration. These narratives served as building blocks for their destigmatization strategies.

Attitudes towards psychiatry amongst medical and nursing students in Singapore

BackgroundA shortage of specialists in psychiatry, both in terms of psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses is evident worldwide. While there are multiple factors leading to an individual’s decision to specialize in psychiatry, the individual’s perceptions and attitudes towards psychiatry tend to play an essential role. This study thus aimed to explore attitudes towards psychiatry amongst medical and nursing students in Singapore and examine factors associated with these attitudes.MethodsThe present cross-sectional study used an online web survey tool to assess attitudes towards psychiatry amongst 502 medical and 500 nursing students in Singapore using the Attitudes towards Psychiatry (ATP-18) scale. Descriptive statistics and multiple linear regressions were used to examine associated factors (sociodemographic and education).ResultsThe majority of students in this population endorsed favourable attitudes towards the following aspects of psychiatry: challenges within psychiatry, importance of psychiatry and psychiatric skills, treatment efficacy and view towards psychiatrists, but had generally unfavourable attitudes towards psychiatric patients. Male participants (compared to female; β = − 1.190, p < 0.05), participants in the middle income group (compared to higher income group; β = − 0.945, p < 0.05), participants who rated average for psychiatry lecture course and psychiatry clinical placement course (compared to above average; β = − 1.654, p < 0.05; β = − 1.181, p < 0.05) had a less favourable attitude to psychiatry. Not surprisingly, participants who were more likely to specialize in psychiatry (β = 2.053, p < 0.001) had a more favourable attitude towards psychiatry compared to those who were less likely to specialize in psychiatry.ConclusionsThe majority of students in this study endorsed unfavourable attitudes towards patients in the psychiatric setting. The present psychiatry curriculum could be improved to nurture the development of empathetic attitudes towards people with mental illness. De-stigmatization strategies could also be integrated into other curricula besides psychiatry.

Disadvantaged, but morally superior: ethnic boundary making strategies of second-generation male Turkish immigrant youth in Germany

ABSTRACTIn this study of minority groups, destigmatization strategies are revealed when it comes to ethnic stratification, socio-economic segregation and the possible courses of second-generation immigrants’ adaptation. Although Germany – with its restrictive citizenship policies, exclusionary public discourses and socio-economic segregation – is characterized by robust ethnic boundaries, the destigmatization strategies of its minorities have been ignored so far. Using a case study of Turkish second-generation immigrant youth in Germany, this article aims to fill this gap in the literature. My findings illustrate that this group of youth mainly assert the moral inferiority of the dominant group through normative inversion, while a few of them appropriate equalizing strategies such as universalizing and contingent detachment. I argue that the reason for different destigmatization strategies can be explained by different degrees of exposure to ethnic boundaries, due to biographical scripts and individual resources. My findings empirically substantiate Lamont’s and Wimmer’s theoretical arguments within the understudied German context.

Mental-illness stigma among Korean immigrants: Role of culture and destigmatization strategies.

Mental-illness stigma among Korean immigrants: Role of culture and destigmatization strategies.

Race, racism, and policing: Responses of Ethiopian Jews in Israel to stigmatization by the police

Immigrants who believe they suffer from stigmatization and discrimination may still demonstrate positive attitudes toward government authorities. We explore this trust–discrimination paradox by examining perceptions about police and policing among Ethiopian Jews in Israel, an immigrant racial minority. Drawing on data collected from focus groups and survey results, we find that levels of trust in the police among Israelis of Ethiopian descent are equal to or higher than among veteran Jewish Israelis. Nevertheless, Ethiopian Israelis also report negative perceptions of the police that are rooted in strong feelings of stigmatization by these government agents. While trust in the police may reflect Ethiopian Jews’ desire for integration, participation, and inclusion as legitimate and equal members of nation and state, we demonstrate that they use various de-stigmatization strategies whose aim is to downplay the importance and depth of their discrimination by the police. These strategies, we argue, allow Ethiopian Israelis to maintain positive attitudes toward the police.

“A Little Costumed Girl at a Sci-Fi Convention”: Boundary Work as a Main Destigmatization Strategy Among Women Fans

ABSTRACTThis article engages with destigmatization strategies among women fans. Contrary to a contemporary disposition among scholars that presents fandom as a legitimate and mainstream phenomenon, this article demonstrates how women fans are still stigmatized as childish, obsessive, and uncritical. In particular, I focus on Twilight and Harry Potter women fans and suggest boundary work as a main destigmatization strategy among them. Based on 15 in-depth interviews with Israeli women fans between the ages of 18 and 30, three main distinctions to establish boundaries were detected: between fans and nonfans, between “obsessive” and “normal” fans, and between fans and “appreciators.” Through this analysis I work to expose an existing stigma regarding female-dominated fandoms and provide an in-depth analysis of their boundary work mechanisms through specific lenses of gender and age.

Adolescents' Perceptions of Opportunities in the U.S. South: Postracial Mirage or Reality in the New Black Mecca?

The scholarly community has eagerly assessed adults' perspectives on race and opportunity in the “postracial” era. Noticeably absent are studies that probe youths' perceptions of social and educational opportunity within this era, given the relationship between education and upward mobility, and the symbolism embodied in Obama's 2008 election as the first African-American president of the United States. This paper uses data drawn from a four-year longitudinal study that examined the educational experiences of Black adolescents in Metro Atlanta, Georgia—referred to as the “New Black Mecca.” Interview data from a subset of 75 Black adolescents participating in an ethnographic study, and 1,329 surveys from a racially diverse group of adolescents across three different high schools, capture: (a) how Black adolescents embraced meritocratic notions of opportunity—while inheriting a social awareness of race-based opportunities, (b) Black adolescents' use of destigmatization strategies to thwart prejudice, and (c) the protective role a predominantly Black suburban context plays in mitigating the effects of day-to-day encounters with racial discrimination.

Stories that matter: subverting the before-and-after weight-loss narrative

Contemporary scholarship does not pay enough attention to stigma in relation to its temporal status; i.e. whether the stigma is temporary and changeable, or is it permanent? The present article links the study of sociology of time, of de-stigmatization strategies and of narrative resistance, through a case study of individuals who are stigmatized on the basis of an attribute perceived as temporary and changeable – fatness. Conducting a comparative analysis of Before-and-After weight-loss articles appearing in an Israeli online health magazine, I examine how these narratives marginalize fat people by presenting fatness as temporary and changeable. I then compare these narratives to life narratives produced by Israeli-Jewish women, who self-identify as fat. Participants subvert mainstream narratives in two ways: (1) assigning the fat body to “After,” thereby challenging the temporary and transient status of fatness and (2) subverting other discursive characteristics of Before-and-After Weight-Loss Narratives. As a result, participants produce valid knowledge and social criticism from a stable fat subject position.

Between global racial and bounded identity: choice of destigmatization strategies among Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Our research explores how Ethiopian Jews in Israel apply local and global cultural resources when forming their reactive strategies to stigmatization. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with adult men and women, we examine class variations in the destigmatization strategies of working-class and middle-class Ethiopian Jews. Working-class Ethiopian Jews rely on their local bounded identity, that of Jews, rather than identity politics, which stresses phenotype in formulating destigmatization strategies. The former provide is Ethiopians of all classes with the network of meaning necessary for active participation in the broader society, whereas the latter is primarily the province of a small number of highly educated middle-class individuals, those who had access to social networks of highly educated liberals and could mobilize valued global black cultural resources (e.g. music, art) to their advantage in the local context.