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A Real and Present Danger in the Fight Against Stigma
By many measures we have achieved considerable progress in combatting stigma and its insidious effects. Persons who experience behavioral health challenges are now more inclined to pursue treatment without incurring the reputational risks they might have borne in prior years. We regularly encourage...
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Personalized Recovery Oriented Services (PROS) Clients Share Their Lived Experiences of Stigma
During the month of May, we at the St. Vincent’s Personalized Recovery Oriented Services (PROS) program participated in the observance of Mental Health Month. The topic “Mental Health Stigma” was so timely in the face of current events taking place in our society. This particular...
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How We as Practitioners Can Foster Stigma
Practitioners, despite our best intentions, may unconsciously foster stigma by downplaying or not recognizing the ways in which power dynamics, implicit bias, stereotypes, and lack of cultural humility can all build barriers to care. To illustrate the stigmatizing potential of a...
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Internalized Stigma
Stigma around mental health is not an unfamiliar conversation in professional circles and, thanks to the hard work of countless teams and individuals, stigma is becoming a more common conversation in our communities, albeit a recent conversation. Prior to this work, stigma didn’t have a context...
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A Cruel Irony: Less Mental Health Stigma but Fewer Behavioral Health Clinicians
Mental health outreach is more prevalent than it has ever been before. Efforts to encourage people to ask for help are seen online, on television, on college campuses, and in corporate headquarters. Many are sponsored by governments, but businesses, educational institutions, and foundations have...
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Associative Stigma: An Unseen Force Impacting Mental Health Professionals and Service Users
Stigma toward people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses is a powerful force with pervasive impacts, some of which operate in subtle ways. In explaining the broad-reaching effects of stigma, Goffman (1963) asserted that persons who are “related through the social structure to a stigmatized...
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The Transformative Power of Families Helping Families
“I can now see that my loved one and their mental illness are separate.” I was fortunate to hear this powerful insight recently from one of NAMI-NYC’s participating family members. The National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City (NAMI-NYC) is built on the transformative power of...
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Jarod Stern, Senior Managing Director at Savills, Joins Mental Health News Education Board of Directors
Jarod Stern, Senior Managing Director at Savills, has recently been approved to join the Mental Health News Education (MHNE) Board of Directors. Debra Pantin, CEO of Outreach and MHNE Board Chair stated, “Jarod has a wealth of experience serving the nonprofit sector and his many ideas will...
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U.S. Law Enforcement Seizures of Pills Containing Fentanyl Increased Dramatically Between 2018-2021
Law enforcement seizures of pills containing illicit fentanyl increased dramatically between January 2018 and December 2021, according to a new study. The number of individual pills seized by law enforcement increased nearly 50-fold from the first quarter of 2018 to the last quarter of 2021 and the...
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When Internalized Ableism and Stigma Intersect
In February of 2020, I received a letter from the government that I had been approved for disability payments. According to their records, I had been disabled with incapacitating, treatment-resistant depression since November of 2017. The Social Security Administration’s definition of disability...
