Читать книгу Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton - Страница 18

We find a particularly powerful and devastating example of a thin description and its dangers in the phenomenon of stigma. Stigma is one of the most destructive aspects of living with unconventional mental health experiences and one of the most painful experiences that people have to endure. Stigma occurs when a person is reduced from being a whole to being a mere part; from being a full human being to being the sum of a single part. The sociologist Erving Goffman informs us that the concept of stigma originated in the Greek slave trade. After a slave was purchased, the slave was branded and, in branding, was reduced (or thinned down) to the size of the brand. The slave was no longer described as a person, a citizen, a friend, or a family member but was now simply property. Stigma functions in the area of mental health in a very similar way. Stigma reduces people living with unconventional mental health problems to the shape and form of their diagnosis, or more accurately, to people’s perceptions and caricatures of the implications of their diagnosis. In this way, stigma thins down or reduces people’s descriptions to impersonal caricatures based on the connotations of their diagnoses. People cease to be perceived as persons and become “schizophrenics,” “depressives,” “neurotics,” or any other thin diagnostic facade that people choose to project when they don’t want to engage with real individuals.