The Problem in the Pill: Antidepressants and Stigma

• In Event: 035 - Regular Session. Navigating Issues Related to Identity, Illness, and Medicalization

Abstract

Core insights from medicalization theory would suggest that the stigma of mental illness is decreasing. Public campaigns from organizations like NAMI and NIMH have focused on framing mental illness as “a disease like any other.” However, studies examining attitudinal data routinely show that, while more Americans believe mental illness is biologically based, when it comes to stigma, public attitudes have changed little over the last several decades. Furthermore, the stigma associated with psychopharmaceuticals – the medications prescribed to treat mental illness – remains largely unexplored. This study sheds light on the paradoxical connections between the medicalization of mental illness and stigma by shifting the focus to mental health consumers. Interviews were conducted with current and former young adult antidepressant consumers, a population that has come of age in a thoroughly medicalized and pharmaceuticalized cultural context, but one that remains relatively unexamined. Even among the most functional individuals whose status as mentally ill may be more ambiguous, but who are mental health consumers nonetheless, stereotypes of depressed individuals as weak and lazy persist. The diagnostic ambiguity of conditions like depression leaves room for doubt about the legitimacy of the illness and, consequently, the need for medication. Individuals taking drugs to treat a stigmatized condition may face the added stigma of the medications themselves. Studies on the connections between medicalization, mental illness, and stigma need to take seriously both attitudes towards medication and the role of psychopharmaceuticals as social objects in the stigma process and the experience of mental health consumers.

Author

• Amy LeClair, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers