Quotes About Stigma

I was dyslexic, so I was put in the silly class at school.

While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be.

When they thought of me, they always remembered the vacuous Billie Dawn. It was as simple as that.

Now that psychiatrists are defrocked weekly in New Yorker cartoons, it's difficult to recall what this once meant, how seriously men like him were taken.

For women, the cruelest state is to be denied; for men it's to be stricken with shame

one should refrain from attributing the cause of disease to the diseased.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

The Queen had real power, and a woman in power, feared as virile, is often accused of being a slut.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they can't recognize that person's gender, the gender-changing person can evoke in others a primordial fear of monstrosity, or loss of humanness.

Turns out a woman choosing adoption, even a woman behind bars, gets a lot more support than a woman who needs an abortion or who plans on keeping her baby.

When Darla told her parents she was pregnant, they made her leave. They were old-school. Said they couldn't handle the shame.

Everyone thinks I do heroin. It's not even true, I do crystal meth.

In 1850, Dr. Samuel Cartwright reported in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal the discovery of a new disease, which he called drapetomania. Drapetomania was a condition that caused sulkiness, dissatisfaction, and a desire to avoid service. It was used to describe slaves who sought to run away from their servitude: drapetes, the ancient Greek word for "runaway slave," and mania for "excessive energy or activity.

ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are suffering, let alone explore it in detail.

It's sad that people listen to music and decide how the singer should look.

some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.

Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility. To speak publicly about one's knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims…. Denial, repression and dissociation operate on a Social, as well as an individual level.

For many centuries, suicides were treated like criminals by the society. That is part of the terrible legacy that has come down into society's method of handling suicide recovery. Now we have to fight off the demons that have been hanging around suicide for centuries.

I have this A-line figure. It starts with my face being small and increases as it goes down. Actually South Indians have this problem. Small face. Big hips.

All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.

Don't stigmatize in a rush to explain inexplicable evil.

Obviously I probably have internalized fatphobia about myself and what the world has ingrained in us.