Quotes About Stigma

We don't have all this gay-bashing crime. You don't see that. It's not there. That is not really happening in Jamaica. But because a few artists basically sing it and put records out and the media runs with it, then the stigma becomes big, and now we're trapped with that whole thing. It's really sad.

When you live a certain way for so long, that's the only way people can see you. I don't necessarily mean that's who you is or you can't change, but it's a stigma that they put on you when you're from a place where I'm from. That's one way of looking at 'Trapped.'

I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.

I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington.

I think connected to poverty is the trauma of poverty. It's not just a material thing; it's a psychological thing that we have no mental health system in this country.

There's a lot of black men running around with crazy trauma scars, and they should be going to therapy. They should be sitting down and talking to people. But they can't. If you've got the armor of being a man, and the armor of being a black man, that hyper-masculine thing can make those scars deeper.

Yes, this is 21st-century America. Where we have better means to treat mental illness than ever before, but choose to let the insane people decide to get it or not.

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.

We need to treat people with mental illness like people.

Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.

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.

My father's card-playing buddies treated me as a plain, ordinary, commonplace kid destined for mediocrity - or less. I suppose they expected that I would spend my life as a clerk of some sort.

Pregnancy is treated like an illness in some sections of our society.

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.

We must have safe places where people can discuss and be treated. Forty-four million people are already dead from AIDS. What logic is there in not discussing the word?

I wasn't bullied or anything, but I was treated differently because I was an actor, and I had big dreams.

In 1976, divorce could still raise eyebrows, as could a woman's decision not to have children. Dyslexia wasn't as commonly recognized then, and thus not treated as it is today.

It's not a giant thrill to hear someone give you the label 'manic-depressive,' but to me I was so relieved. What I was suffering from had a name and could be treated.

A lot of women have been whistle-blowers in the past, and a lot of them have just gotten torn down and treated terribly. One of the things that kept popping up was this idea that if you do whistle-blow about sexual harassment, then that is what will define the rest of your life.

For mental illnesses, we need better access to treatment and diagnosis.

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.

In order that people who suffer from depression seek treatment without a second thought, the stigmas must further fall until we reach a point in time when that person with leukemia and that person with depression both receive the same level of sympathy and the same level of rigorous treatment. Both people deserve it.

I think when you see 'Ridiculous Six,' the show speaks for itself in terms of its treatment of American Indians.