BACKGROUND Little is known about the characteristics of health workers. The objective of this study was to figure out the characteristics of different types of health workers involved in Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) work. METHODS The study comprised of 444 community health workers and 822 potential DOTS workers; the participants attended the training course and completed st...

Anna is a twenty-one year old woman who has struggled with anorexia nervosa for several years. She blames herself for developing the eating disorder and not being able to control her eating and purging. Anna’s family and friends cannot understand how someone as smart and thoughtful as her could care so much about her physical appearance and what others think of her. They also feel frustrated th...

Nutritional sociology uses sociological theories and methods to study and influence food patterns, eating habits, and nutrition. Obesity and weight loss are important topics in nutritional sociology, and stigmatization of the obese is a long-standing interest. Most past sociological work has only described stigmatization, rather than developing ways to facilitate coping with it. A model for cop...

OBJECTIVES Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is understood as a developmental disorder which shares common characteristics between childhood, adolescence and adulthood. However, ADHD is widely associated with misconceptions and misbeliefs which can lead to stigmatization. Teachers have an important role for the individual development as they accompany students for a long period of...

WHEN MURRAY AND LOPEZ IN 1996 INTRODUCED THE IDEA OF THE DISability-adjusted life-year (which measures healthy years lost to premature mortality or disability), it should have come as no surprise when they found that 7 of the top 10 causes of disability in industrialized countries were mental disorders. Unipolar major depression and alcohol abuse, the top 2 on this list, caused more years lost ...

As a chronic skin condition characterized by periods of remission and recurrence and the necessity for long-term treatment, psoriasis significantly affects the patients' quality of life (1). This negatively affects the everyday functioning of psoriatic patients who frequently feel excluded and have decreased self-image and self-esteem, reflected by their impression of being stigmatized (2). Thi...

OBJECTIVE To address how health professionals may inadvertently contribute to the stigmatization of patients with chronic pain. SETTING Formulation and implementation of the Australian National Pain Strategy. DESIGN Review of current concepts of stereotyping and stigma, consideration of their relationship to empathy, and how they might impinge upon the clinical encounter. FINDINGS The ext...

In this study, we compared internalizing and externalizing problem behavior of 67 Dutch adolescents (M(age) = 16.04) in planned lesbian families who were matched with 67 adolescents in heterosexual-parent families. We also examined whether homophobic stigmatization was associated with problem behavior in adolescents with lesbian mothers after taking into account demographic characteristics, mot...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether stigmatization was associated with psychological adjustment in adolescents from planned lesbian families and, if so, to examine whether individual and interpersonal promotive factors influenced this association. Seventy-eight adolescents (39 girls, 39 boys; mean age 17.05 years) completed an online questionnaire about psychological health problem...