Easing the Burden of Stigma: Stigma-Informed Care and Support Interventions (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781738358434)

It is perhaps more important than ever before to try to understand how social stigmas affect our life and the lives of those whom as professionals we are trying to help. The purpose of this book is to advance stigma-informed practices within organizations dedicated to helping individuals through difficult life circumstances and transitions.For helping professionals, the approach implies a reflection and an awareness of their own adherence to various stereotypes and stigmas and how they affect their helping relationships.

A stigma-informed approach to care and support interventions stems from the realization that various forms of stigmatization and exclusion affect the individuals and groups we purport to help. It is grounded in an understanding that exposure to various social stigmas can impact an individual's psychological and social development and wellbeing, mental health, access to opportunities, and willingness or ability to seek and receive help. The approach recognizes the signs and widespread impacts of stigma, especially when they are internalized by individuals and undermine their self-identity, self-confidence and agency. It prepares practitioners to support people facing various stigmas and to empower them to adopt healthier stigma coping strategies.

The approach also seeks to avoid further stigmatizing individuals or enabling unhealthy coping mechanisms. It prioritizes the physical, psychological and emotional safety of service users and staff. The approach also seeks to address the barriers that people affected by stigma typically experience when accessing care and support services.

Individual resilience is the maintenance of positive adaptation by individuals despite experiences of significant adversity. A stigma-informed approach is essentially about empowering people to cope with stigma in a healthy and self-affirming way and helping them develop resilience. A key to addressing self-stigma is to promote personal empowerment, self-efficacy and agency. Empowerment is, in a sense, the flip side of stigma, involving agency, control, activism, righteous indignation, and optimism.

By facilitating agency and self-efficacy, empowerment can lead to higher self-esteem, better quality of life, greater adherence to treatment, and increased social support. Empowerment and resilience building interventions may take different forms, including stigma reduction, stigma remediation, or counselling and treatment interventions. We explore them in more detail in this chapter.