Étude discursive de la stigmatisation de la maladie mentale : l'expérience des étudiantes et étudiants universitaires québécois
Beginning in the spring of 2019, an awareness campaign on mental health issues has been deployed on the campus of the Université de Montréal. Many similar initiatives have been launched across the province of Quebec that aim to eliminate the stigma of mental illness. Thus, a new, positive and anti-stigmatizing Discourse is challenging the deep-rooted Discourse that stigmatizes mental illness in society. By Discourse, it is necessary to understand a discursive whole that takes up ideologies and the meanings of phenomena; this is materialized in words and social interactions (discourse). There is thus a growing tension inherent to the very meaning of mental illness.  The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to better understand this tension between these two Discourses in the words and attitudes of Quebecers. The research project focuses on university students because of their hybrid age bracket (leaving adolescence and entering adulthood) where the societal tolerance for mental illness tends to shift from indulgence for children to stigmatization for adults. To this end, focus groups with Quebec university students allowed us to depict their perception of this discursive tension in their interpersonal relationships. The discussion transcripts were thematically analyzed. The main results show the emergence of a dissonant discourse, which mixes stigmatizing and anti-stigmatizing Discourse, and the persistence of stigmatizing Discourse held by people who are socially distant from the sick person. These findings formed the basis of a relational model of how participants experienced the stigma of their mental illness, providing a new perspective on the theory of labelling and stigmatization.
Stigmate Mental illness Stigma Stigmatization Discourse/discourse Focus group Labelling theory Discours Discourse