OBJECTIVE Many psychiatric patients suffer from self-stigma. One consequence of these internalized prejudices is decreased treatment efficacy. Much has been written about the effects of self-stigma in patients with severe mental disorders. However, individuals with minor psychiatric disorders also suffer from self-stigma. It is therefore necessary to explore the effect of self-stigma on treatme...

Stigmatization is characterized by chronic social and physical avoidance of a person(s) by other people. Infectious disease may produce an apparently similar form of isolation-disease avoidance-but on symptom remission this often abates. We propose that many forms of stigmatization reflect the activation of this disease-avoidance system, which is prone to respond to visible signs and labels tha...

Leprosy is a disease which has struck fear into human beings for thousands of years. This is partly because it causes considerable deformities and disabilities. In 1991, the 44th World Health Assembly adopted a resolution to eliminate the disease as a public health problem by the year 2000. However, one of the major obstacles to achieving this objective is the stigma associated with the disease...

The aim of this article is to briefly review the literature on stigmatization and more generally identity threats, to focus more specifically of the way people appraise and cope with those threatening situations. Based on the transactional model of stress and coping of Lazarus and Folkman (1984), we propose a model of coping with identity threats that takes into accounts the principle character...

Health-related stigma and its dramatic consequences for those stigmatized have long been a crucial concern for public health authorities globally. However, before concluding that stigma spoils the lives of people with a particular disease or disability and is a major obstacle to obtaining/providing adequate health care, it is necessary to first determine whether there is actual stigmatization r...

The processes by which women of color andWhite women living in the United States detect and respond to prejudice may differ because women of color experience racism, sexism and intersectional bias. This review builds on past research by articulating how existing process models of stigmatization, when applied to the stigmatization of women of color, leave important research questions unanswered....

ii Abstract This study investigated how biological and environmental causal explanations affect the stigmatization of college students described to have major depression and anorexia nervosa. Participants (38 male and 87 female college students) read a vignette about a college student with either major depression or anorexia nervosa that provided either a biological or environmental causal expl...