Stigmatizing communication and mental health

Stigma profoundly affects people living with mental illness, influencing nearly every aspect of their lives and shaping experiences across the lifespan. Stigma also undermines institutions purported to serve, protect, and advocate for people living with mental illness. To develop effective interventions that can reduce mental illness stigma, it is essential to understand the fundamental processes driving its creation, spread, and expression. Drawing on scholarship from communication and allied disciplines, this chapter explores the intersections of mental illness stigma and basic processes of message production, diffusion, and effects. We specifically highlight theories and research addressing three points of intersection. First, we discuss how messages are created and diffused to socialize mental illness stigma within communities. Second, we explore how people living with mental illness use communication to cope with stigmatizing experiences, emphasizing both the effectiveness and challenges of different coping strategies. Third, we examine verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal communication acts used to express antipathy, devaluation, or even violence toward stigmatized groups. We also consider emerging research on the role of multiple, intersecting identities in these communication processes. The chapter concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for communicating about mental health and designing interventions to eliminate mental illness stigma.