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They Are Us
If the last two years have shown us anything it has shown us how resilient we are. It has also reminded us all just how vulnerable we can be. These are two important truths that are too often overlooked, forgotten, or denied. As we strive to build mental health awareness in our communities, it is...
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Acknowledging the Effects of Intersectional Stigmatization
Our work is devoted to helping health professionals learn different types of stigmas, recognize the effects of stigmatization, and guiding the implementation of effective strategies to assess and address those stigmas in a variety of settings. This article outlines the most common forms of mental...
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Understanding the Impact of Stigma: The Balance Between Choice and Accountability
In contrast to today’s social media saturation, the burgeoning technology of the mid-2,000s was a time of comparative innocence. Similarly, candid conversations around mental health were virtually non-existent. Fewer than five years out of college, I’d recently been forced to resign from my...
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Some Thoughts Regarding Stigma: The Often Silent Obstacle to Mental Health and Substance Care Among African Americans
The term stigma according to the Merriam Webster dictionary is Greek or Latin and indicates “a mark of shame or discredit.” It most often refers to “a set of negative and often unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something.” When addressing the concept of stigma...
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Coordinated Behavioral Care’s Mission to Destigmatize Workplace Mental Health
When Emily Grossman began work as Training Institute Manager at Coordinated Behavioral Care (CBC), she had the same fear that had plagued her at the start of other jobs. As a person who is “out” about living with mental illness, she had always worried whether this new working environment would...
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Breaking Down Barriers to Using Social Determinants of Health Data
This is the time to use technology to overcome the barriers in integrating social determinants of health (SdoH) information into healthcare but ensuring that infrastructure and standardization is in place will be a joint effort. If one were to think about individual health, you might think...
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Stigma Is Being Used as a Political Weapon: Reject It
I and many others have said it before but, as recent events make clear, we will have to say it again and again and again: Mental illness is not the cause of mass murder in the United States. The continuing assertion by the political right that it is has become a core element of the vituperative...
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Intersectionality in Behavioral Health: Serving Those with Membership in Multiple Stigmatized Groups
What are your social identities? How do you identify and how does the world see you? “Intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, emphasizes the “multidimensionality” of oppressed people’s lived experiences and recognizes how various types of oppression frequently...
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Consumer Perspectives: Overcoming the Stigma of Mental Health, Chronic Illness, and Homelessness
This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on a particular topic. The authors are served by Services for the UnderServed (S:US), a New York City-based nonprofit that is committed to giving every New...
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Overcoming the Stigma of Mental Illness: Peers Play a Critical Role
Sharing a lived experience may be the single most important tool we have to address the stigma of living with a mental illness, and the isolation of COVID only exacerbated how important it can be to have someone to talk with who truly understands. Over the past two years, we all learned to keep a...
