WISCONSIN UNITED
for MENTAL HEALTH

MONTHLY FEATURE JUNE 2008:
BATTLING STIGMA

No one is immune from depression, not men, not professionals, not the educated. And people dealing with depression are in a special position to combat the stigma associated with mental illnesses, because they understand first hand how it feels. Read about one man's effort to educate others in his profession about depression.

Dan Lukasik, a New York attorney, decided to create a Web site after he struggled with depression.  Lawyers with Depression (www.lawyerswithdepression.com)

 "Attorney's Mission is to Erase the Stigma of Depression" (.pdf; New York Law Journal article about the
Web site)

Related Article:
Medical Expertise Ups Suicide Risk For MDs: Profession's Stigma Of Mental Illness, Doctors' Easy Access To Drugs Contribute To Problem - CBS News

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MONTHLY FEATURE AUGUST 2007:
STIGMA AND DEPRESSION PRESENTATION




Depression and Stigma:  What Research Tells Us (and Doesn't Tell Us) about the Design of Effective Anti-Stigma Messages. A July 26, 2007 presentation based on research by Jonathan Kanter, Keri Brown and Laura Rusch of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.



"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. We learn that as kids and only if it were true. Words hurt. Labels hurt. Negative words have negative consequences."

Ok so what exactly is stigma? It turns out there are around 5 or 10 different measures of stigma that have been created by researchers, but if you look at them, most of them focus on a really broad stigma about mental illness in general and are not specific to depression. So in my lab we looked at all these measures, changed some of the items to make them relevant to depression, and put them all together into one huge 100 item measure, and gave it to 387 depressed adults. We wanted to figure out if there were components of stigma of depression that were important to identify and distinguish so we used a technique called factor analysis to do that, and here’s what we found.

We found five distinct factors that were nonetheless related to each other. They are public stigma, stigmatizing experiences, self-stigma, treatment stigma and secrecy. The problem definitely starts with public stigma – negative attitudes about depression held by friends, family members, the general public, the media.

Public stigma and stigmatizing experiences leads to self-stigma, where you start to believe these stereotypes, and treatment stigma, where you don’t seek help for it, and secrecy, where you avoid new relationships, don’t know what to say in job interviews, and in general have this major aspect of your life that you need to hide from every one around you. And that is depressing. In our study, all of these components correlated significantly with depression – public stigma less so, but we see here that the more depressed you are, the more stigmatizing experiences you’ve had, the more self-stigma, the more treatment stigma, and the more secrecy.

So this just highlights how important it is to address stigma – it not only keeps people out of treatment but it participates in a vicious cycle that makes depression worse.

To read more about Kanter's research visit our Combating Stigma - Research page.
View the presentation (11 M PowerPoint file)

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