Mental Illness: A Case Study

Words: 483
Pages: 2

Different parts of the world has implement some anti-discrimination laws to protect people with mental illness overtime. However, the advance in legislation did not achieve very satisfying outcome in reducing public stigma. A large number of people with mental health problems still will not seek help in United States for fear of being isolated by the society. Apparently, the expansion of anti-discrimination laws fight against the discrimination within different domains, such as education, employment and health services (Cummings, Lucas & Druss, 2013; Corrigan & Watson, 2002). However, it directly addresses only one component of the public stigma and ignore the effect of the other two components, the stereotype and the prejudice. In fact, all of which in fact interact with each other in a complex social-cognitive way (Cumming et al., 2013). Although the legislation may …show more content…
In this way, those patients may still manifest some self-stigma even with the protection from laws (Cumming et al., 2013). For example, one with mental disorder is refused employment by a company, that individual who is treated unfair may not seek help from the legislation for they are afraid to be publicly labeled as mentally abnormal, especially in an eastern culture like China. Also, the legislation helps forbid some explicit discriminative behavior, but it could not effectively stop the implicit discriminative behavior if the public still hold a negative attitude. Take the American With Disabilities Amendments (ADA) as an example. Although the employers are not allowed to directly ask the applicants about the mental illness history, they may still use some implicit method such as using some affect cues and ask questions on the time gap between previous jobs to screen out people who may suffer from mental problems (Mechanic,