Quotes About Stigma

Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth. Treatments

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.

When I said that I had a history of mental illness, I was told that in that case I could not well expect anyone to take my views on these things seriously. "I'm a trained professional and I'm here to help you," the doctor said. When I said that I was an experienced patient and knew that what she was doing was in fact injurious to me, she told me that I had not been to medical school and would just have to proceed according to what she judged an appropriate protocol.

I believe that the emergency room policy in which saying "I have had severe psychotic depression exacerbated by extreme pain" is treated much the same as saying "I have to have a woolly teddy bear with me before you can use sutures" is unacceptable.

No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.

El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía.

In his classic work Stigma, Erving Goffman argues that identity is formed when people assert pride in the thing that made them marginal, enabling them to achieve personal authenticity and political credibility.

Unusual bodies have been described throughout history as reflections of sin, as omens from the gods, as the basis for laughter or charity or punishment.

In the twentieth century, homosexuality was said to be caused by overbearing mothers and passive fathers; schizophrenia reflected the parents' unconscious wish that their child did not exist; and autism was the result of "refrigerator mothers," whose coldness doomed their children to a fortress of silence. We've now realized that such complex and overdetermined conditions are not the result of parental attitude or behavior.

Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.

To take medication as part of the battle is to battle fiercely, and to refuse it would be as ludicrously self-destructive as entering a modern war on horseback. It is not weak to take medications; it does not mean that you can't cope with your personal life; it is courageous. Nor is it weak to seek help from a wise therapist.

You say that you really don't want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication: "Well, I sure hope you get off sometime soon," they say.

In the United States, 150,000 people with schizophrenia are homeless; one in five people with schizophrenia is homeless in any given year.

At least three times as many mentally ill people are in jail as are in hospitals.

When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it.

The damage in many cases was lifelong. These women had not just surrendered a child. They had surrendered control over the most important decision they might ever make to people who they felt did not necessarily have their best interest at heart. The shame was no longer about being single and pregnant. The shame was that they had given away, or not fought hard enough to keep, their child.

According to the prevailing double standard, the young man who was equally responsible for the pregnancy was not condemned for his actions. It was her fault, not their fault, that she got pregnant. This was in that period of time when there wasn't much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something. —

It's very hard to explain—part of me had enough indoctrination to believe I was not a mother. They make that very clear: "You're not a mother. You are too young. You are a bad person. You got pregnant and you aren't married. You are not entitled to this baby. You're gonna give this baby a chance in life." Part of me accepted that wisdom, but then there was the other part of me that had feelings that I wasn't supposed to have. So

I didn't want anybody to see me walking out of the hospital with this baby. We got into the car and my mom said, "What's wrong?" I said, "I'm afraid that someone's gonna come take the baby." I was waiting for the police to come. Giving up my first son had left such an imprint. It was trapped in my brain…I was not allowed to be a mother. Society

Religious unreason should acquire and even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principal causes of armed conflict in our world. Before you can get to the end of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what someone else believes about God. Perhaps it is time we demanded that our fellow human beings had better reasons for maintaining their religious differences, if such reasons even exist

we women always feel guilt, even about things that can't be helped.

He's paragon schnitzophonic.' 'He's what?!' 'Paragon schnitzophonic,' repeats Uncle Al. 'You mean paranoid schizophrenic?

It would never occur to me to wear pink, just as it would never occur to Michael Douglas to play a poor person.

am accustomed to being downgraded by businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, Washington hotshots, various scientists. Even their secretaries, who get their notions of what matters from television, hide their smiles behind their hands and give one another the high sign when I turn up—some incomprehensible goofball.