Stigma
by
Stigma has attracted attention within the health humanities in large measure because it relates to core human emotions and behaviors about disease, disability, and the body in historically and culturally specific ways. Exploring stigmas associated with various conditions and their effects on individuals and groups—through humanistic and other qualitative approaches—offers insight into fundamental questions of suffering, caregiving, social relations, health disparities, ethics and values, as well as health-care outcomes. The health humanities, broadly construed, offer important approaches and methods for understanding how stigma is generated and functions, the harms it produces, as well as strategies to mitigate its impact. Although the word stigma has deep historical and theological lineage from ancient Greece to early Christianity, the modern centrality of the study of stigma as a critical concept and problem is rooted in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present, a time of examination of universal human rights and civil rights around the globe (Hunt 2007; Donnelly 2013; Allport 1958). As a result of disease-related stigmas, people and populations have found themselves subject to prejudice and demoralization, abuse and discrimination, isolation and segregation, as well as harassment and violence. The powerful moral and pejorative judgments about those who have...
This essay may be found on page 195 of the printed volume.