Impacts of Mental Health Stigma and Ways to Fight it out

Stigma vastly involves negative behaviour or discriminating attitude towards someone, based on their distinguishing characteristics such as a mental illness, health condition, or disability. And mental health stigma is one of the leading causes of worry for many in our country.

Many pieces of research and studies have shown that stigma is one of the leading risk factors contributing to poor mental health outcomes. It massively reduces the chances that a person who is suffering from a mental illness or trauma will receive appropriate and adequate care and treatment.
Woefully, the mental health stigma is still very common these days. As stigma is not only limited to mental conditions or attitudes towards psychiatric illnesses, social stigmas can also be related to other characteristics including gender, sexuality, race, religion and culture.

What are the types of mental health stigma?

Social Stigma
It includes the attitudes and behaviours people have around mental illness. Mental illness is not a topic that we openly talk about and most of the time we do so because we are fearful of society that what people will think of us? Or what will society say?

Related article- Reasons you should prioritise your mental health

Self-perceived Stigma
It involves an internalized stigma the person with the mental illness suffers from inside. Self-perceived stigma leads to an internalized shame about having a mental illness.

What are the impacts of Stigma?
The aftermath of stigma can be terrifying. The aftermath of Stigma includes a lack of understanding that is dreadful itself. Nut it also has various other effects such as feeling fear, anger, and intolerance directed at other people. People indulged with stigma are likely to experience:

Poor lifestyle
Terrible mental health
Increased feelings of shame and self-doubt
Social avoidance and Isolation from the society
Lack of understanding between family and friends

How can we fight the Stigma and the situation better?
There are some things that you can do to help fight both social stigma and self-perceived stigma about mental illness.

Educate
Educate the people around you about social and self-perceived stigma. Use facts and figures in case you need them. Make people overcome the Harmful stereotypes of people with mental illness. More than 50% of people around the world suffer from some sort of mental illness and they don’t even have a clue about it. We should make people aware of it and tell them that it is common.

Mental health Issues to read up on

Being a listener
We have to be good listeners if we want to help. Listening helps people to find a comfort zone. If you will listen to the person who is suffering, you can get to know what are their struggles and what they are suffering from. So, you can appropriately help them.

Share stories of people who dealt with the same consequences.
Sharing stories of people in the same situations will help a lot. People will find a comfort zone if they will get to know about these stories that they are not alone, many people suffer from the same.

We should be conscious of our language.
Society stereotypes such as media depictions where the villain is often a character with a mental illness, Halloween costumes that depict people with mental illness as violent and dangerous, trying to showcase mental health issues as if tried harder people can overcome it or snap out of it. We should try to avoid all of these.

Choose empowerment over shame and be honest with the treatment.
If you are suffering from a stigma. You should seek help towards the matter without any shame. And you should be honest with the doctor about the treatment.

We should talk openly about these issues without any hesitation.

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