alone in this, but apparently not. The term consumer is fairly popular, though, and I wonder if that’s because organizations are trying to be politically correct.
Education as a strategy
When it comes to attempts to educate the public about mental illness, Corrigan doesn’t mince words: “Education, at least for adults, is an overrated, mostly feckless approach to erasing stigma.” He gives the example of myths versus facts as a common type of educational approach. This seems rather unfortunate; I certainly love me a good myths vs facts!
The messages are likely to go right over the head of the average person who is already prejudiced; plus, they can trigger reactance, thereby increasing stigma. Corrigan gave an example of a similar effect that’s been observed with campaigns to educate parents about vaccines, which have actually increased resistance to vaccination.
Another surprise? Apparently, public service messages that mental illness is biologically based are actually unhelpful, because people seeing these messages tend to conclude that recovery is unlikely. Even cheerful antidepressant ads about suddenly un-depressed people singing and dancing and enjoying life can also lean people towards conclusions that recovery is unlikely.
One of the messages that I tend to be quite fond of is that mental illness is just like any other else, but guess what? Such messages can actually increase perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability.
Contact as an anti-stigma strategy
Ok, so what does work? For “normal” people to have contact with people living with mental illness. It’s most effective when the contact is with average people rather than seeing celebrities open up about their experiences with mental illness. Contact works best with people who are believable as having a mental illness but don’t conform closely with stereotypes. If the contact with someone who is acutely unwell and acting like a “crazy person”, that’s more likely to reinforce stereotypes. Contact also works better when it’s with people from similar sociocultural groups.
Corrigan explains that contact is effective because not only does it decrease negative beliefs, it helps to replace them with positive ones. It’s 2-3x more effective than education at changing stigmatized attitudes.
Sharing our stories
What advice does he have for us to share our stories effectively? We should share stories of our illness experiences, but also about our recovery journeys, whatever those might be inside the context of our particular illness patterns. We should talk about how we have been affected by stigma in spite of what we’ve managed to overcome, and then conclude with a call to action to address this injustice.
The thing with contact, though, is that it requires us within the mental illness community to speak up. To have the greatest effect, we need to not openly speak up anonymously online, but also “come out” in our regular environments. We need to make it personal. We need to demonstrate that there are many faces of mental illness, not just the stereotyped homeless person on the street. That’s not to say that coming out is easy, but to really make a dent in stigma a critical mass of us needs to do so. We truly can be the change we wish to see in the world.
Were you surprised by anything this book had to say about what does and doesn’t work? Do you have any ideas about the best way for us to fight stigma?
You can find The Stigma Effect on Amazon (affiliate link).
I received a reviewer copy of the book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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