A new qualitative study, posted as a preprint on SciELO, examined how people in Colombia experience psychosocial disability in their daily lives.
The project was led by Lina María González Ballesteros, Mario Sebastián Rodríguez Durán, and Anny Juliana Fonseca Quintero, affiliated with Colombian universities and research institutes. Together, they sought to understand how stigma and self-stigma affect people with psychosocial disabilities across different regions of the country.
“In Colombia, a country marked by armed conflict and deep social inequalities, stigma and perceptions of psychosocial disability critically influence access to rights and services,” the authors write.
“Although official policies promote inclusion and rehabilitation, they often fail to connect with local realities due to the persistence of stigma and discrimination, the effects of self-stigma on the subjective appropriation of rights, and the limited meaningful participation of persons with disabilities in key processes such as peacebuilding”
The results highlight not only the persistence of stigma in Colombia but also its role as a defining barrier to inclusion worldwide. Patients described being marked by diagnoses, excluded from workplaces and public services, and, in many cases, internalizing the prejudice they faced.
Their accounts connect to a broader global conversation in which psychosocial disability is understood as a rights-based framework meant to resist exclusion and the colonial legacies of psychiatry, yet one that remains difficult to translate into daily life. The Colombian study underscores how legal reforms alone cannot dismantle stigma, and why meaningful change requires shifting cultural attitudes, institutional practices, and power dynamics in communities.
