On
Stigma and its Public Health Implications
Bruce
G. Link, Ph.D.
Research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma in the co-occurrence of its components — labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss and discrimination — and further indicate that for stigmatization to occur, power must be exercised. The stigma concept we construct has implications for understanding several core issues in stigma research, ranging from the definition of the concept to the reasons stigma sometimes represents a very persistent predicament in the lives of persons affected by it. Finally, because there are so many stigmatized circumstances and because stigmatizing processes can affect multiple domains of people’s lives, stigmatization probably has a dramatic bearing on the distribution of life chances in such areas as earnings, housing, criminal involvement, and access to health care. Our explication of the stigma process leads us to the conclusion that stigma probably plays a major role in shaping public health outcomes by exposing stigmatized persons to health harmful circumstances, by increasing stress, decreasing coping resources and by posing a significant barrier to receiving optimal health care.
September 2001