A new paper, by Dr. Imogen Tyler and Dr. Tom Slater, contextualizes recent campaigns to end the stigma around mental health and urges readers to rethink how the concept of stigma is being used. Their article, published in The Sociological Review Monographs, takes aim at the Heads Together campaign in the UK, asking questions such as “Where is stigma produced?,” “By whom?,” and “For what purposes?”
“This is not to say that talking about mental distress with friends and families cannot lessen social stigma,” Tyler and Slater write, “rather that anti-stigma initiatives which want to remove barriers to help-seeking, but that do not simultaneously address either the erosion of public service provision or the deeper social causes of increased levels of mental distress, will be limited in their impact.”
Stigma, a word traced back to 20th century North American sociology and psychology, is defined as “the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance.” Tyler and Slater cite Hacking’s interpretation of Goffman, writing that stigma is a “‘remarkable organizing concept,’ a way of seeing, classifying, and understanding a vast array of discriminatory social attitudes and practices.”
In modern-day anti-stigma campaigns, such as the Heads Together movement in the UK, stigma tends to be defined as occurring intra-individually–as an action from one person to another that reflects individual beliefs. The solution to stigma is then positioned as occurring through face-to-face conversations to change personal attitudes and transform social beliefs.
Tyler and Slater point out that this intrapersonal concept of stigma obscures social and political context, writing, “What is frequently missing is social and political questions, such as ‘how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality.’”