[DOWNLOAD] "Service-Learning with the Mentally Ill: Softening the Stigma (Report)" by Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Service-Learning with the Mentally Ill: Softening the Stigma (Report)
- Author : Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 225 KB
Description
Negative attitudes or stigmas toward those who have mental illness are real, painful, and damaging. Graf and colleagues (2004) reported that for people with mental illnesses, experiencing negative social stigma is strongly associated with a lower overall quality of life. According to the United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), negative stigmas discourage people with mental illness from getting mental health treatment; keep them from getting good jobs and advancing in the workplace; lead to fear, mistrust, and violence; result in inadequate insurance coverage; and can lead to prejudice and discrimination (National Mental Health Information Center, 2008). Stigmas against the mentally ill are common in today's society. Johnstone (2001) observed that these negative views are "deeply ingrained (and often structurally reinforced) societal attitudes of fear, ignorance, and intolerance" (p. 204), making them extremely difficult to modulate. The mainstream media may play a part in formulating and perpetuating negative attitudes toward those with mental illnesses. For example, despite the fact that those with mental illness are much more likely to be victims of crime, they are most often portrayed on television and in the movies as the perpetrators of crime (Eisenberg, 2005). Widely distributed news coverage of the small minority of people with mental illness who do commit heinous crimes, along with mainstream media's pervasively negative representation of those with mental illnesses, is common and often times sensationalized (e.g., Lawson & Fouts, 2004; Stuart, 2006). For example, The NBC News Corporation (NBC News, 2008) recently reported an account of a man who drowned his three young children in a hotel bathtub in Rockville, Maryland. He was embroiled with his ex-wife in a bitter custody battle when he took the childrens' lives and then attempted to take his own. World-wide news accounts of this tragic circumstance were quick to report that he had a "history of mental problems." The only evidence they cited detailing the presence of mental illness was that he had been seen "sleeping in his car" and engaged in the practice of "bringing strangers to his home."