Hosted by the GPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Global Mental Health & Stigma Program
What should a person do when mental health symptoms arise? Strong public mental health messaging tells us that it is good to self-label symptoms and to seek appropriate treatment for them. Join Dr. Bruce Link for a conversation discussing results that suggest there is an understandable reason why people might avoid self-labeling and that simply chalking it up to illiteracy or a lack of insight might be doing more harm than good. While controlling for symptom severity and other factors he finds that as youth move in and out of self-labeling over the two-year period their self-esteem is affected -- those adopting a self-label experience a decline in self-esteem while those shedding a self-label they once endorsed experience a boost in self-esteem.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Bruce Link is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at the University of California Riverside and Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. Currently he is conducting research on the life course origins of health inequalities by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, the consequences of social stigma for the life chances of people who are subject to stigma, and on evaluating intervention efforts aimed at reducing mental illness stigma in children attending middle school.