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The stigma of mental illness can be as harmful as the symptoms, leading to family discord, job discrimination, and social rejection. The existence of mental illness stigma has been well established, but stigma theory must go beyond demonstrations and mere descriptions. This article addresses which characteristics across mental disorders lead to stigmatization and social rejection. Participants (N = 270) read case histories depicting individuals with 40 mental disorders, rated those individuals on 17 dimensions (e.g., dangerousness to others, treatability, social disruptiveness), and indicated how willing they were to reject these individuals on a social distance scale. This yielded a ranking of mental disorders by degree of stigmatization; most importantly it reveals the structure of mental illness stigmatization. Only three dimensions were essential in accounting for rejection: personal responsibility for the illness, dangerousness, and rarity of the illness. These dimensions provide an efficient and effective account of the causes of social rejection in mental illness (Multiple-R of .78, p < .0001).
In 1972, presidential candidate George McGovern named U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. Only two weeks later, however, McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw his nomination, a request that the vice presidential candidate reluctantly honored. The reason for this sudden withdrawal was simple-Eagleton had admitted to being hospitalized and receiving electroconvulsive-"shock"- therapy for depression.
Mental illness causes two kinds of harm. The first is from the direct effects of the disorders-cognitive, affective, and behavioral difficulties that limit one's ability to function effectively. It is the second kind of harm that is the focus of this article-the social rejection, interpersonal disruption, and fractured identity that comes from the stigma of mental illness.
Goffman (1963) defines stigma as "an attribute which is deeply discrediting" (p. 3); the stigmatized person is "the bearer of a 'mark' that defines him or her as deviant, flawed, limited, spoiled, or generally undesirable" (Jones et al., 1984, p. 6). Mental illness stigma can lead to strained familial relationships (Lefley, 1989), employment discrimination (Farina, Felner, & Boudreau, 1973), and general social rejection (Corrigan, Edwards, Green, Diwan, & Perm, 2001). The more individuals with mental illness feel stigmatized, the lower their self-esteem (Link, Struening, Neese-Todd, Asmussen, & Phelan, 2001), life satisfaction (Rosenfield, 1997), and social adjustment (Perlick et al., 2001). Moreover, stigma...