Overcoming Stigma as an Academic With ‘Schizophrenia’

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From PublicSource: “I spent years in a variety of roles in and out of public mental health, logged over a hundred academic publications plus public-facing guidance materials and reports and landed major research grants. Nonetheless, tenure — after so many years spent believing such an accomplishment was impossible — registered as a surprise.

Perhaps inevitably, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I felt relief and a sense of greatly expanded freedom to speak out about the discrimination I (and many others) experience.

But I also felt guilt, because such a success stands so obviously in contrast to the hundreds or thousands of brilliant individuals with significant disabilities who have been locked out of academia entirely, for all the wrong reasons. Guilt, too, because whatever social status I now have, it is certainly not the status afforded to people with ‘schizophrenia’ as a group.

For most people diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia,’ the more normative outcomes are institutionalization, incarceration, unemployment and poverty. And why these outcomes?”

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7 COMMENTS

    • I can’t agree with that definition. Stigma implies an unfair negative bias based on a label or category. Prejudice implies specific actions taken as a result of believing in the superiority of one group over another. Discrimination is specific acts to harm someone in a category against which one is prejudiced. There are frequently no legal consequences to prejudice and discrimination, and in fact, they are often rewarded. I remember in 6th grade or so standing up for a kid labeled as “mentally retarded.” He was being harassed, so most definitely acts of prejudice. I’m sure he was also not included in people’s social groups, which is a form of discrimination. You know who got punished when I stood up for him? ME! I was “accused” of being a “retard lover” or some such thing. This went far beyond “stigma.” Where are the legal consequences for such acts?

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      • I walked away from my comment thinking: It’s flawed. So I appreciate you pointing out why.

        Stigma is a social bias, often, which itself arises from prejudicial and discriminatory beliefs and systems. As a thing. Personally I think it is only ever prejudice and discrimination and the word stigma is a way to weasel out of consequences.

        Agreed, there are seemingly rarely consequences, or certainly never enough. For some, the consequences would represent some kind of Marxist conspiracy forcing them to grow up and act more civilised, an actual affront to their God-given right to be a git to those that they perceive as lesser in some way. The War on Childishness.

        Just go on defending the oppressed. It may never be acknowledged but your and others’ souls will reap the rewards.

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  4. The awakening to the concept of discrimination or stigma could be a function of the development of language. I attempted to take a graduate class being taught by a social worker, Wayne Chess in the City Planning Program at OU in the late 70’s. My Father was dying of illness and I would be having problems absorbing the discussion of terms relevant to the categories of “the mentally ill”. The targeted group made real as a group to be funded by policy makers across the country was occurring in an effort to create “community mental health centers. Dr. Wayne Chess’s obit is in the NYT?, where you read how he would be invited ot the White House to dine with Carter. To understand the bias, the process, within the experience or external as in an “objective” viewer can not help but have bias in the process of conducting a clinical experiment or aggregating data where the uniqueness of the citizen becomes merged with indicators the verbiage is looking for or how the professionals are sifting for signals that suggest issues that may not have legal consequences yet! Even then, law can be relatively stiff and not as pliable or forgiving to move with the expressions by which the individual is attempting to integrate their inner realities with those of the world outside of self.

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    • Whether one chooses “stigma” over “discrimination” matters considerably.

      ‘Stigma’ places the onus on the victim, ‘discrimination’ places it on the perpetrator. The starkest example of that was perpetrated in WWII Germany. “Stigma”, not being a legal term of art, has no place in law, ‘discrimination’ does.

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