Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders

Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309439124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.

Stigma

Stigma PDF Author: Erving Goffman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439188335
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life analyzes a person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to people society calls “normal.” Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront, and be affronted by, the image others reflect back to them. Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals” He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma, the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts. “This short book established the conceptual understanding of stigma that continues to buttress contemporary sociological thinking.” —Sociological Review

Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness

Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness PDF Author: Patrick W. Corrigan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470683600
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness offers practical strategies for addressing the harmful effects of stigma attached to mental illness. It considers both major forms of stigma: public stigma, which is prejudice and discrimination endorsed by the general population; and self-stigma, the loss of self-esteem and efficacy that occurs when an individual internalizes prejudice and discrimination. Invaluable guide for professionals and volunteers working in any capacity to challenge discrimination against mental illness Contains practical worksheets and intervention guidelines to facilitate the implementation of specific anti-stigma approaches Authors are highly experienced and respected experts in the field of mental illness stigma research

Class and Campus Life

Class and Campus Life PDF Author: Elizabeth Lee
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703889
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In 2015, the New York Times reported, "The bright children of janitors and nail salon workers, bus drivers and fast-food cooks may not have grown up with the edifying vacations, museum excursions, daily doses of NPR and prep schools that groom Ivy applicants, but they are coveted candidates for elite campuses." What happens to academically talented but economically challenged "first-gen" students when they arrive on campus? Class markers aren’t always visible from a distance, but socioeconomic differences permeate campus life—and the inner experiences of students—in real and sometimes unexpected ways. In Class and Campus Life, Elizabeth M. Lee shows how class differences are enacted and negotiated by students, faculty, and administrators at an elite liberal arts college for women located in the Northeast. Using material from two years of fieldwork and more than 140 interviews with students, faculty, administrators, and alumnae at the pseudonymous Linden College, Lee adds depth to our understanding of inequality in higher education. An essential part of her analysis is to illuminate the ways in which the students’ and the college’s practices interact, rather than evaluating them separately, as seemingly unrelated spheres. She also analyzes underlying moral judgments brought to light through cultural connotations of merit, hard work by individuals, and making it on your own that permeate American higher education. Using students’ own descriptions and understandings of their experiences to illustrate the complexity of these issues, Lee shows how the lived experience of socioeconomic difference is often defined in moral, as well as economic, terms, and that tensions, often unspoken, undermine students’ senses of belonging.

Stigma in Class

Stigma in Class PDF Author: Katie R. Billings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The majority of mental illness on college campuses remains untreated, and mental illness stigma is the most cited explanation for not seeking mental health treatment. Working-class college students are not only at greater risk of mental illness, but also are less likely to seek mental health treatment and hold more stigmatized views toward people with mental illness compared to affluent college students. Research on college culture suggests that elite college contexts may be associated with greater stigmatization of mental illness. This study bridges the social status and college culture literatures by asking - does social status and college context together predict students' mental health attitudes? By surveying 757 undergraduates at an Ivy League university and a Non-Ivy League university, I found that 1) elite college students had greater mental illness stigma than non-elite students, 2) social status was positively related to personal stigma and negatively related to perceived stigma, and 3) low social status students at the Ivy League university had greater personal mental illness stigma compared to their counterparts at the Non-Ivy League university. Low social status students' perceptions of themselves as social status minorities may be responsible for their greater stigmatization of mental illness in the elite college context. These findings suggest that increasing socioeconomic diversity on college campuses may improve lower social status students' mental health attitudes.

Race and Class Matters at an Elite College

Race and Class Matters at an Elite College PDF Author: Elizabeth Aries
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 159213727X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
How race and class collide at a prestigious liberal arts college.

Stigma

Stigma PDF Author: Gerhard Falk
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615923969
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
What is it in human nature that leads us to label some as insiders and stigmatize others as outsiders?Sociologist Gerhard Falk examines the social psychology that motivates this process of exclusion, focusing on the outcasts in contemporary American society and comparing current experience with examples from the past. Referring to the work of Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman, Falk reviews the whole range of stigmatized people from the mentally ill to ordinary people with unpopular occupations, like undertakers and trash collectors. Amid the wide diversity of stigmatized persons, he finds two basic types of outsiders: the "existential" and the "achieved." The first group comprises those who are stigmatized because of their very existence, regardless of their specific actions: the mentally handicapped, for example. The second group describes those whose actions or life conditions have resulted in stigma: from high achievers (often subject to resentment) to criminals. Falk also looks at the ways in which writers past and present have dramatized stigmatized characters in literature.This fascinating overview of a long-standing and widespread social problem will be of interest to all those concerned about creating a more fair-minded society.

Stigma and Culture

Stigma and Culture PDF Author: J. Lorand Matory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629773X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
"Stigma and Culture "by J. Lorand Matory is a courageous auto-ethnographic examination of the stigma attached to color. The work is a major contribution to a new scholarly genre, a form of anthropological theory-building in memoir form. Its varied gestures include: paeans to past mentors; rich recollections of childhood; ethnographic analyses of various cultural institutions, especially Howard University; re-conceptualizations of Caribbean/African significances vis-a-vis African Americans in the United States, and more. Such a wide-ranging effort is precisely what recommends this bookand what makes it like few other books in Anthropology or Africana Studies. Matory argues that several ironies highlight class-based (seemingly post-racial) social formations while also reinforcing racialization and challenging such racial logics from within. He shows how educational institutions are spaces for the paradoxical production of both elitist/post-ethnic class identities and for the fostering of would-be ethnic particularity and differenceall at the same time. Providing a nuanced window into variously situated Black groups in the United States (including the seemingly exotic little races or tri-racial isolates such as Louisiana Creoles and the oft-discussed Gullah/Geechee), this book argues that the longstanding scholarly assumption about social isolation as a causal mechanism for the cultural legitimacy of such groups is absolutely wrong. Instead, Matory shows that all of these groups are quite decidedly produced in and through contact with their ostensible others. Ethnic purities and particularities are the byproducts of anxieties and efforts birthed from the contact that such purities are meant to deny. This is one of the book s most powerful interventions, and Matory provides compelling arguments for how so many get this wrong. Ultimately "Stigma and Culture" explains not just the continuing significance of race and ethnicity as seen in various American contexts, but also makes the case for how new and old ethnic differences are enabled and produced in the contemporary moment."

Making College Work

Making College Work PDF Author: Harry J. Holzer
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815730225
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Practical solutions for improving higher education opportunities for disadvantaged students Too many disadvantaged college students in America do not complete their coursework or receive any college credential, while others earn degrees or certificates with little labor market value. Large numbers of these students also struggle to pay for college, and some incur debts that they have difficulty repaying. The authors provide a new review of the causes of these problems and offer promising policy solutions. The circumstances affecting disadvantaged students stem both from issues on the individual side, such as weak academic preparation and financial pressures, and from institutional failures. Low-income students disproportionately attend schools that are underfunded and have weak performance incentives, contributing to unsatisfactory outcomes for many students. Some solutions, including better financial aid or academic supports, target individual students. Other solutions, such as stronger linkages between coursework and the labor market and more structured paths through the curriculum, are aimed at institutional reforms. All students, and particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, also need better and varied pathways both to college and directly to the job market, beginning in high school. We can improve college outcomes, but must also acknowledge that we must make hard choices and face difficult tradeoffs in the process. While no single policy is guaranteed to greatly improve college and career outcomes, implementing a number of evidence-based policies and programs together has the potential to improve these outcomes substantially.

The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health

The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health PDF Author: Brenda Major
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190243473
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Stigma leads to poorer health. In The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health, leading scholars identify stigma mechanisms that operate at multiple levels to erode the health of stigmatized individuals and, collectively, produce health disparities. This book provides unique insights concerning the link between stigma and health across various types of stigma and groups.