Stigma and Mental Health: Exploring Potential Models to Enhance Opportunities for a Parity of Participation

Over the past two decades, stigma in mental health has become an increasing concern for researchers, practitioners, service users, and policymakers. This has led to a number of international government funded campaigns to reduce stigma and discrimination against people with mental health problems. In this paper, we examine the theoretical and conceptual foundations of these stigma campaigns in order to critically examine what version of mental health is being presented and what the implications are of the campaign messages for people with mental health problems and wider society. We present two models, one which deals with the stigma of mental illness, and another that deals with a stigma in mental health. We propose these models underpin much anti-stigma work in mental health, and that they are respectively predicated on individual or social aetiology models. Both of these models present problems for anti-stigma campaigns that must be addressed if opportunities for an ethics of inclusion for people with emotional distress are to be advanced. In connecting this paper to the themes of the special edition we argue that Mad Studies and associated forms of ‘epsitemic resistance’ need to be incorporated into anti-stigma campaigns in order to truly represent the plurality of perspectives from survivor movements.