What we need is person-centred care

Sukhera and colleagues [1] have tackled a thorny issue. Despite good intentions, health care providers are among the groups most often identified by people with a mental illness as stigmatizing toward them. Recurrent themes in the literature that fall under the rubric of stigma are that patients feel as if they were being patronized, humiliated, treated like children, excluded from treatment decisions, being assumed to lack capacity to be responsible for their own lives and treatment decisions. Other problems include not being given sufficient information about their illness and treatment options, prognostic negativism, and at times, the unspoken threat of coercive treatment [2]. As this paper points out, this has as much to do with accumulated organizational practices as it does with individual biases and personal prejudices. We have known for some time that prejudices are resistant to change, particularly prejudices that are rooted in fear of unpredictability and violence. Yet, many antistigma programs draw on ‘off-the-shelf’ educational solutions without ever considering the underlying theory that might explain why a given intervention might be effective. Thus, programs abound that try to raise awareness or correct stereotypic beliefs. However, there is no supporting evidence from social psychology to suggest that prejudices are responsive to such information. People will selectively attend to information that supports their prejudices and negative habits and actively discount information that contradicts them [3]. As vividly illustrated in the case of health