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6d7db0e
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When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker ... but as survivors. Survivors who don't get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.
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depression
fear
mental-health-stigma
recovery-quotes
stigma
stigmatized
shame
recovery
mental-illness
mental-health
survivors
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Jenny Lawson |
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f39a358
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The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY.
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stigmatization
mental-health-stigma
stigma
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Erving Goffman |
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9bc2f8a
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...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.
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stigma
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Erving Goffman |
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e86e526
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One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.
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labels
religion
stigma
heresy
sainthood
orthodoxy
dogma
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Ellis Peters |
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d513cca
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Here I want to stress that perception of losing one's mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.
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stereotypes
madness
stigmatization
mental-health-stigma
stigma
stigmatized
mental-hospital
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Erving Goffman |
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bef08c0
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"My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that." I looked at her. "Like what?" "Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again."
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depression
mental-health-stigma
stigma
decision
hospital
mental-health
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Sylvia Plath |
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5e95749
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"On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:
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pain
suffering
stigma
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William Styron |
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dcacf59
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The more there is about the individual that deviates in an undesirable direction from what might have been expected to be true of him, the more he is obliged to volunteer information about himself, even though the cost to him of candor may have increased proportionally.
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stigma
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Erving Goffman |
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74c9ea6
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Each time someone with a particular stigma makes a spectacle of himself by breaking a law, winning a prize, or becoming a first of his kind, a local community may take gossipy note of this; these events can even make news in the mass media of the wider society. In any case, they who share the noted person's stigma suddenly become accessible to the normals immediately around and become subject to a slight transfer of credit or discredit to themselves. Their situation thus leads them easily into living in a world of publicized heroes and villains of their own stripe, their relation to this world being underlined by immediate associates, both normal and otherwise, who bring them news about how one of their kind has faired.
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stigma
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Erving Goffman |