STIGMA

The stigmatized individual finds himself in an arena where he is told what to think of himself

Erving Goffman

Picture yourself exactly as you are. Your body, just as it is. Your usual appearance, your hair, the way you dress, your apparent gender, your apparent age, the region you grew up in, your political leanings, the particular way you speak and gesture — picked up from your family or the community that raised you.

Now imagine that one day you walk into a specific place where there are many people, or at least enough of them. It could be the lobby of a company where you've come to apply for a job, the reception area of a clinic where you have an appointment, the entrance of a building where you're visiting a friend or looking for an apartment, an airport, a restaurant, a classroom, the corridor of a shopping mall — anywhere, really.

At a glance, you notice that most of the people there don't look much like you in some particular way that, in that specific setting, makes you stand out. The people already there resemble each other along some shared axis — they're the same ethnicity, the same social class; their clothes, shoes, and accessories are more or less the same style, probably more expensive than yours; none of them show any obvious physical or mental disability; they're all cisgender; they have college degrees; they seem to come from what would be called stable families; and they appear perfectly at ease with one another. This is their territory.

The moment your presence registers, you sense that something about you has immediately caught everyone's attention. People may pause for a second — stop talking, stop what they're doing — and turn to look in your direction. However brief that look, it leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that something "wrong" has been detected. You're being evaluated, you realize, even if you can't quite name the criteria, by people who seem to have appointed themselves the authority to do so. You wonder: is it your appearance? The shade of your skin? The texture of your hair? The shape or the visible functioning of your body? The probable price tag on your clothes? Your accent, the way you speak, the way you move and gesture? What you know for certain is that all of it was scanned and processed in an instant by people who consider themselves entitled to do the scanning. And the verdict has already been delivered, with no right of appeal. Your place — a place that clearly isn't here — has been determined by a brief, merciless assessment that showed no interest whatsoever in the story you carry, where you come from, your habits, desires, knowledge, relationships, or dreams. Does any of this sound familiar?

If it does, you've learned firsthand what stigma means.

Stigma may be precisely this: the cruel haste with which some signal we emit is enough to get us filed away in a box — usually an unpleasant one — or to have a label stuck on us, one that's even more embarrassing than the box itself.

Putting names to things

The word stigma comes from the Greek stígma: a mark, an engraved sign, a wound inscribed on the body. In the ancient world, it referred to a visible mark burned or cut into someone's skin to signal disgrace, punishment, shame, inferiority, or the status of slave or criminal. But stigma was never just a physical mark — not then, and not now. It's a social inscription. The body comes to carry, in plain sight, a message about the value assigned to that person. A mark that the collective gaze imprints on someone, reducing what should be a complex, detailed perception to a single surface characteristic.

It's worth untangling a cluster of related words, because they get so muddled together that the very mechanism they're supposed to reveal can end up hidden.

A stereotype is a generalizing belief applied to members of a particular group: "people like that are dangerous," "they can't be trusted," "they don't want to work," "they're emotionally unstable." It's a kind of mental shortcut that replaces actual knowledge of a person with a prepackaged idea about the category we imagine them to belong to.

Prejudice begins when that stereotype acquires a negative charge and becomes judgment, fear, revulsion, contempt, or disapproval. Discrimination is the moment when belief and feeling convert into action — or deliberate inaction. It's failing to hire, failing to promote, failing to invite, failing to listen, providing worse service, pushing people aside, surveilling them more closely, blocking access, or inventing a neutral-sounding justification for an inequality that was decided before anyone even walked through the door.

Social isolation, for its part, isn't necessarily synonymous with stigma, but it can be one of its consequences. Sometimes people are directly excluded; other times, they anticipate the rejection and withdraw before anyone has the chance to hurt them again. And then there's the isolation produced by institutions themselves — when schools, companies, healthcare systems, neighborhoods, and shared spaces are organized in ways that keep certain people permanently outside, whether literally or symbolically.

Stigma pulls all of these pieces together into a broader process: someone is marked, associated with stereotypes, sorted into "us" versus "them," lowered in social standing, and exposed to discrimination. And there's one decisive detail: for this to move beyond personal dislike and become stigma, someone needs enough power to make the label produce real consequences — the power to deny a position, close a door, undermine someone's credibility, define what counts as "normal," decide who deserves protection and who can be abandoned without causing much of a stir.

A distinctive way of being; a genetic trait; a diagnosis; a limitation; a body that doesn't match the dominant idea of beauty or normalcy; a history that left visible marks; a failure to conform to models of what is masculine or feminine, respectable or vulgar; a particular socioeconomic status; a religion that, like any system of ideas, can be debated or criticized but should never serve as grounds for humiliation or persecution; being a woman; being elderly; being a poor immigrant; carrying any kind of vulnerability — suddenly, that one thing stops being merely one aspect of a person and becomes the whole of their identity. Not an identity the person has chosen as a way of understanding themselves, but one imposed by others, immune to any counter-argument or defense. The human being disappears behind the label that has been slapped on them without their consent. We no longer see someone who suffers, struggles, tries, fears, loves, or lives. We see only a noun modified by a shallow, incomplete, and probably false adjective.

And this isn't something only brutes, the uneducated, or self-declared bigots do. Stigmatizing is, to some degree, a shared form of social control. All of us risk simplifying others to avoid having to deal with the effort of actually understanding them. Labeling is easier than comprehending. Categorizing takes less work than listening. Reducing someone to a formula protects us from the inconvenient recognition that they, like us, are contradictory, vulnerable, unpredictable — and that they, like us, don't entirely fit the norm either.

And isn't that, perhaps, where certain kinds of hatred come from? Not every kind of hatred, but the kind that stigmatizes without the slightest reflection? I find myself asking this uncomfortable question — in the consulting room and outside it. The most plausible answer I can find, among others, is exactly what I just said: how can we hate something or someone we genuinely don't know? It's not logically possible, is it? So when hatred is directed at a stranger, that stranger must be standing in for something we do know — something that, if it isn't in the other person, is in us: something that frightens us, repels us, fills us with shame or dread of social judgment, something that has to stay hidden. So we redirect our gaze from ourselves to the other — the one who is "flawed" — and in doing so, avoid being the one observed. Hatred can reveal more about the one who hates than about the one who is hated.

It's fair to say, then, with reasonable confidence, that the stigmatized person has never truly been seen by those who classify them — let alone by those who hate them. They've been observed, labeled, and filed, based on surface characteristics. But truly seen? No. Between seeing and looking there is an abyss. To see is to register a shape. To look is to bear witness to a presence. Stigma is born precisely when we stop being able to bear the full, human complexity of another person and reduce them to the part that most unsettles us about ourselves.

Invisible stigmas, invisibilized people

Stigma and prejudice aren't always as explicit as in the scenario above — where "you" are the one who's different, walking into a room full of people who make no effort to hide their rejection. Some practices go even further than the cruelty we thought was the upper limit. There are people — and there are many — who stigmatize inwardly and say nothing. They smile at you with their mouths while their eyes convey a verdict that needs no words. They may remark among themselves, among their own kind, but it's through action and inaction — not through words — that they set in motion, at full force, everything stigma is capable of doing: quietly edging you out of the circles where you "don't belong," at university, at work, at parties, on outings, in life; mocking or diminishing you through passive aggression, through a compliment laced with criticism and unstated assumptions; never explicitly saying that the promotion, the position, the recognition wasn't given to you because you were the best candidate — just finding ways to conclude, against all evidence, that someone from the club you're excluded from deserved it more, precisely because they belong to the club and not because of any concrete quality. In everyday life, stigma is what makes us quickly roll up the car window at a red light when someone visibly hungry and defenseless approaches to ask for help. It's what keeps the manual laborer, the sanitation worker, the person living on the street — the very people who most need warmth and support — at arm's length. I'm not claiming any moral high ground here or presenting myself as an example of perfect conduct. I am, uncomfortably, another person who looks away from everything that feels like too much trouble or takes too much time, and that only adds to the already enormous social debt I should be paying as compensation for certain privileges I was handed simply by being born. Our illusion of being "good people" doesn't absolve us of responsibility.

Hurting even more: self-stigma

And nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse. After entering the place where you've just arrived and felt that you don't belong, "you" lose whatever ease and naturalness you had. From that point on, all you think about is getting out as quickly as possible. No one needs to spell it out — you got the message on your own.

That is precisely what stigma wants: for the person to no longer need to be attacked from outside, because they've learned to do the work against themselves, from within. After having their status as "different" reinforced so many times, the person who has been stigmatized comes to accept it as unquestionable fact. This is the person who arrives at my office — or anywhere else in the world — already apologizing for being who they are.

This process, which we call self-stigma, means learning to judge yourself with the world's words. The person internalizes stereotypes — and it's devastating to acknowledge that this can happen very early, at the very moment they first come to know themselves as a person. Without timely and appropriate intervention, they grow up with no real sense of what self-esteem is, no confidence in their capacity to build a life, to construct themselves, to be worthy of love or to sustain a meaningful project. Their inner world becomes filled with a voice that says: "you're not like other people," "you can't do it," "there's no point in trying, there's no chance for someone like you," "you're strange," "you have no value and you never will," "you are not deserving of love."

A matter of mental health — and much more

It should also be said that when I stigmatize an individual for belonging to a group, I stigmatize that entire group. When I attribute diminishing qualities to them, I diminish everyone who resembles them — and differs from me. Stigma operates as a two-way street: the group "contaminates" the individual who comes from it, and the individual who departs from the norm contaminates their group in return. There's no exit from this circular, perverse logic, because the intention is to subjugate and condemn at any cost. There is no redemption built into it.

But I can't close this post without making absolutely clear that stigma is a genuine determinant of mental health, and without saying something about what can actually be done to address it — while acknowledging that we are still a very long way from eliminating it.

Old authoritarian, segregationist impulses, driven by the fear that one day we ourselves might receive a psychiatric diagnosis, are always lurking: depression is lack of willpower, anxiety is overreaction, bipolar disorder is mere lack of self-control, psychosis is synonymous with social danger, chemical dependency is a failure of character, ADHD is a failure of parenting. As if psychological suffering still had to prove its authenticity before it deserved care.

Concrete possibilities for psychosocial intervention

Psychophobia isn't the only thing that makes stigma a focus for mental health intervention. In the field of mental health, confronting stigma requires much more than correcting offensive words or sharing lists of symptoms. Mental health literacy — teaching what mental disorders are, how they manifest, and how they can be treated — matters. Information can correct myths, make it easier for people to seek help, and prevent suffering from being mistaken for moral weakness. But information alone isn't enough. Knowing the cause of an "abnormality" doesn't automatically make anyone more capable of respecting someone who lives with it.

One of the most effective strategies is genuine social contact: people with lived experience of mental disorder meeting others — not as clinical specimens to be examined, nor as tragic testimonials displayed to provoke pity, but as interlocutors on equal terms. When someone tells their whole story — including suffering, treatment, setbacks, achievements, relationships, work, and recovery — it becomes harder to keep seeing only the diagnosis. Contact tends to be especially transformative when it involves cooperation, shared goals, and clear institutional support. I'm not referring to classroom arrangements where, instead of improving anything, the person who is "different" ends up in a kind of display case that only reinforces the perception, among classmates and sometimes even educators, that they are dealing with some kind of aberration.

In healthcare settings, this means offering care oriented not merely toward symptom reduction, but toward recovery of a life: autonomy, participation in decisions, peer support, strengthening of relationships, reintegration into education and work, support for families, and help for the person to build an identity that isn't swallowed whole by their diagnosis. Specific psychotherapies and targeted interventions can also challenge self-stigma, rebuild self-esteem, and address the paralyzing belief that says: "why bother trying, when people like me never succeed?"

No professional is exempt from this kind of review. Technical knowledge doesn't immunize anyone against prejudice. Physicians, psychologists, nurses, teachers, police officers, and social workers also need to examine the language they use, the lower expectations they sometimes hold for certain individuals, and the decisions they make in the name of a supposed protection. There is care that heals. And there is care that, though it presents itself as care, infantilizes, silences, and strips the person of the right to direct their own life.

The media also occupies a decisive place. Every time it automatically links mental disorder to violence, turns a diagnosis into an insult, or only shows someone in moments of crisis, it helps manufacture the social character who will later be feared on the street. Responsible representation doesn't need to romanticize suffering. It only needs to show that a full person exists before, during, and after it.

A social problem

In much the same way, mental health alone can't be expected to solve the problem. Stigma is as pervasive as society itself. Behaviors, classifications, and movements that are born with society need to be continually interrogated and reimagined. That means revisiting not only what we individually believe, but also the social mechanisms that decide which differences will be treated as significant and which will be overlooked.

There are countless characteristics that distinguish one human being from another. Society, however, selects certain ones, assigns them a negative meaning, and uses that meaning to establish hierarchies. This is the point made by sociologists Bruce Link and Jo Phelan: stigma doesn't reside simply in the characteristic, nor does it live only inside the mind of the one who judges. It is completed when a difference is named, associated with stereotypes, used to separate "us" from "them," and converted into loss of status and discrimination — all within a relationship that gives someone the power to impose their definition of normalcy on another.

Stigma can show up in an obviously unfunny joke, but it can equally be found in a hiring process. It can appear in a family comment just as readily as in a medical protocol, a recruitment algorithm, a police stop, a school policy, a bank's interest-rate calculation, a rental contract, a judicial decision, or the way a public budget allocates resources. As we've seen, there is the explicit stigma of those who say "I don't want people like that here." And there is structural stigma — more polished, harder to catch — which never says those words aloud, but arranges everything so that "people like that" never get close.

It's also necessary to acknowledge that these marks don't live in isolation. Skin color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, age, disability, place of birth, and diagnosis can all intersect in the same person. This isn't simply a matter of adding prejudices together like numbers in an equation. A Black lesbian woman, for example, may be perceived and treated in ways that don't correspond to the experience of being a woman, or of being Black, or of being queer in isolation. The forms of exclusion mix, reinforce each other, and produce particular experiences that can't be read off from their separate parts. That is what the concept of intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, tries to make visible.

And not every encounter between different groups automatically reduces prejudice. Placing people in the same space while preserving inequality, competition, and humiliation between them can actually reinforce the distance. Contact transforms when genuine recognition is possible: some degree of equality, shared goals, cooperation, and clear support from the school, company, service, or authority in charge. It isn't enough to allow someone through the door. It's necessary to stop reminding them, with every gesture, that they are still only a tolerated guest.

Public policy, accountability, and affirmative action

Finally, public policy plays a central role — because it isn't enough to ask stigmatized people to be resilient, develop self-esteem, and learn to better endure a world that remains organized to exclude them. That would be the equivalent of leaving a staircase intact and offering climbing lessons to the person who needed a ramp.

Confronting structural stigma requires anti-discrimination laws, accessible reporting channels, effective investigation, redress for harm, and accountability for those who violate rights. It also requires scrutiny of less visible practices: who gets hired, promoted, or dismissed; who receives the worst care; who drops out of school; who is most frequently stopped, restrained, hospitalized, incarcerated, or even killed; who appears in institutional campaigns and who remains absent from the statistics themselves.

Affirmative action is part of this work when historical inequalities would not be corrected simply by declaring that "everyone is equal now." The same applies to reasonable accommodations in the workplace and in education, supported employment and educational programs, confidentiality protections, community mental health services, access to housing, income, and legal aid, ongoing training for professionals, and — crucially — the participation of people directly affected in designing, implementing, and evaluating the policies that concern their own lives. When all of this will cease to be utopian, I don't know; but even humanity's greatest achievements began as ideas.

Criminalizing serious discriminatory conduct has its place, but no law alone dismantles a culture. A law can name violence, set limits, punish, and provide redress. It cannot, however, force someone to truly see another person. That's why legislation, education, social contact, responsible media representation, social protection, and institutional transformation need to advance together.

Institutions should also periodically ask whether their apparently neutral rules produce unequal outcomes. It isn't enough to declare a door open if the road leading to it has been blocked off for some people. And it isn't enough to invite stigmatized people to the table after all the decisions have already been made. Participation isn't being in the photograph — it's having a voice, a vote, resources, and real power to influence the outcome.

Promoting justice isn't about treating unequal people equally. It's about treating those who need it most differently, so that equality can finally be achieved. So before delivering that fierce critique of the "handouts" given through affirmative action — take, for example, the much-maligned racial quota systems — let's be honest with ourselves: how many white "standard" families don't claim their right to free medications through the public health system? How many don't deduct healthcare and education expenses from their income taxes? What company doesn't make full use of legal exemptions to reduce its tax burden and increase its profits?

And even if some people who identify as "socially normative" might make an exception — choosing to forgo a given public benefit so that the resource can go to someone who needs it more — it's worth remembering that people with fewer privileges can make exactly the same choice, out of personal conviction. And many of them do. I've seen it more than once. No one is entirely on the right side of this when the reality is far more complex and multifaceted than the two tidy boxes we usually try to fit everything into, in the illusion that they're sufficient to explain the world.

***

To put it simply: stigma begins the moment singularity stops being received with curiosity and starts being treated with suspicion.

And if we look carefully, almost everything that is most human in us refuses to fit the mold. Pain refuses. Desire refuses. Sensitivity refuses. The way we think refuses. The way we love refuses. The human mind, with its delicacy and its disorder, refuses. Perhaps the problem was never difference. Perhaps the problem has always been our difficulty in living alongside it without converting it into moral defect, threat, or inferiority.

In reality, there is nothing trivial about waking up every day with the feeling that the world demands from you a way of existing that you cannot offer — not because you're incapable, but because it would require you to betray your own nature.

That's why I think the opposite of stigma isn't exactly something called tolerance. To tolerate is still, to some degree, to keep your distance. This subject asks for more than that. It asks for a deeper kind of recognition: the capacity to see a person without reducing them to what unsettles us, to resist the temptation to convert pain into judgment, difference into sentence, diagnosis into destiny.

It also asks something uncomfortable: that each of us ask not only "in what moments was I stigmatized?" but also "in what moments did I stigmatize?" When did I stop seeing someone and start seeing only a category? When did I choose a label over the living presence of a human being? When did I use language to defend myself from the other, instead of moving toward them?

At its core, stigmatizing is a refusal of relationship. It is giving up too soon on the work of understanding. It is freezing someone into a narrow version of themselves, so as not to have to bear the vastness of who they actually are.

And here I'll go a step further. Our passive, silent acceptance of the other "as an equal" — even when it involves a personal gesture of affection, an individual act of support for someone who has been targeted, or a simple coexistence that sets differences aside with each encounter — is not enough. It doesn't redeem us. I'll borrow here from the Brazilian philosopher and activist Djamila Ribeiro, who argues that it isn't enough not to be prejudiced; prejudice must be actively and publicly combated. Treating people who don't fully conform to social norms as worthy of equal dignity is, precisely, a social problem — which means that we, who are part of that same society, need to fight to eradicate it: first, so that none of us, indiscriminately, ends up being swallowed by the problem at some point; and second in order of mention but not of importance, out of a commitment to what the word "human" actually means — everything that concerns humanity concerns me, and keeping that concept dignified is each person's responsibility.

In the end, perhaps what all of us want is simply this: not to be absolved, not to be admired, not to be forced into a mold — just to be seen clearly enough to be allowed to be simply human.

***

Sources consulted (not formatted as academic citations):

Anthony Jorm: originator of the concept of mental health literacy (1997)

Antonio Nardi, Antônio Geraldo da Silva, and João Quevedo: Tratado de Psiquiatria da Associação Brasileira de Psiquiatria (Artmed, 2022)

Bruce Link and Jo Phelan: "Conceptualizing Stigma," Annual Review of Sociology (2001)

Djamila Ribeiro: Pequeno Manual Antirracista (Companhia das Letras, 2019)

Erving Goffman: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963)

Gordon Allport: The Nature of Prejudice (1954) — on the conditions under which contact between groups can reduce prejudice

Kimberlé Crenshaw: originator of the concept of intersectionality (1989)

Mark Hatzenbuehler: research on structural stigma (2014 and 2016)

Patrick Corrigan: research on self-stigma and the "why try?" effect (2006–2012)

Image generated by AI from a prompt by the author.