What do you believe are the best ways to reduce
stigma against persons with mental
disorders? How might the belief that mental
disorders are genetic, biological disorders
help to reduce stigma? How might this belief contribute to stigma?
The ability to ascribe a person’s actions to their
own conscious desire and decision to act that way is one of the cornerstones of
feeling able to blame that person for
their bad behavior. As Hinshaw and Stier point out, much of the stigma regarding people with mental illness
stems from others blaming them for their deviant behavior. If more people
became aware that many severe mental illnesses are genetic, biological
disorders, and therefore beyond the sufferer’s conscious decision, they may be
less likely to blame the sufferer for
their behavior.
However, increasing awareness of the biological
factors of disorders may have ill effects on the public’s perceptions of the
mentally ill, as well. They may then perceive patients as “unfixable”, unlike a garage door which can undergo garage door repair, and
therefore permanently dangerous, and thus less deserving of time and effort to
treat them.
However, I believe that stigma is not only a
cultural problem. As Hinshaw and Stier briefly mention in their discussion of
the origins of stigma, many people consider the mentally ill outside their
‘ingroup’, that is, the people they are morally obligated to treat with
altruism. They point to the evolutionary tendency to dehumanize people we do
not consider “like us”. And not only are such outsiders not bestowed with
altruism, humans also have a hardwired tendency to want to outright punish anyone who violates the norms of
the customs of their ingroup. Such a tendency makes sense from an evolutionary
standpoint –cheaters and non-cooperators in a group who violate the rules must
be punished in order to maintain a culture of non-cheating and rule adherence,
and therefore mutual benefit from cooperation. But in this day and age, this
tendency to make moral judgments in such a way often leads to unnecessary bias
and stigma against people who cannot help violating the norms of society.
So not only are the genetics and biology of the mentally ill
contributing to the stigma problem, everyone’s
genetic tendencies are exacerbating the problem.