Abstract
The stigma of mental illness is conceived in this study as the loss of a valued attribute. The loss, however, is not irreversible. It is proposed that the undoing-of-the-loss is most successfully accomplished in a family in which there is a full role complement and a clear division of labor. The two pilot studies of patients recently released from mental hospitals upon which the formulation is based are reported.
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The data for this analysis were collected under Research Grant Number 6911 Nursing Division, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. We wish to thank Drs. Newton Bigelow and Donald Graves of Marcy State Hospital and Drs. Marc Hollender and Philip Steckler of Syracuse Psychiatric Hospital for helping us to locate our groups of patients. We thank the students of the School of Public Health Nursing of the Upstate Medical Center and their faculty advisors for their collection of the data reported here.
As this research report was completed before the appearance of Erving Goffman'sStigma (Goffman, 1963), no attempt will be made to relate the two different, but probably not incompatible, approaches to the problem.
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Cumming, J., Cumming, E. On the stigma of mental illness. Community Ment Health J 1, 135–143 (1965). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01435202
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01435202