Internalized stigma and self-presentation strategies of persons with psychotic and psychiatric experiences.

Stigma is detrimental to persons experiencing mental distress, as it impacts on their social inclusion, quality of life, and recovery. In this article, we present the self-presentation strategies employed by persons with psychosis to manage internalized stigma. A study of the life trajectories of persons with psychosis analyzed 27 biographical interviews and identified five types of biographical trajectories.

[Social stigma in mental illness: A review of concepts, methods and empirical evidence].

Sixty years are coming close since the first edition of the book by Goffman on social stigma, and research that connects it with mental illness has produced significant knowledge across different scientific fields, such as psychiatry and social sciences. This paper aims at providing a review of that scientific knowledge published over the last decades, and covers the following topics: a) basic theoretical concepts related to social stigma, such as public stigma, self-stigma, structural stigma and stigma by courtesy, b) representative findings of international empirical studies in regard to public attitudes towards mental illness, c) the measurement of social stigma in mental illness and the development of methodologies, such as scales and vignettes, d) the understanding of social stigma as a mechanism of producing and reproducing social inequalities in a form of symbolic power, e) the psychological and social consequences of social stigma on people' s lives-targets of social stigma, themselves and their families, and, finally, the public campaigns designed and delivered to fight social stigma. Recent advances in the theory of social stigma, as proposed by Pescosolido & Martin, conceptualize social stigma as a dialectic process enacted within a specific socio-historical context of power relations and Link & Phelan give insights of the processes through which social stigma, either implicitly or explicitly, produced and legitimated by institutional practices.

Social class and mental distress in Greek urban communities during the period of economic recession.

Background: This study draws on old and well-established evidence that economic change, and especially recession, affects people's lives, behavior and mental health. Even though the literature is rich on the relationship between unemployment and mental distress, there is a renewed research interest on the link between socio-economic inequalities and psychological health.

Aims: The study investigates the relationship of social class with mental distress during the hard times of persistent and severe economic crisis in Greece by conducting a comparative, community study in the country's second largest city, Thessaloniki.

Socioeconomic inequalities in general and psychological health among adolescents: a cross-sectional study in senior high schools in Greece.

Background: Socioeconomic health inequalities in adolescence are not consistently reported. This may be due to the measurement of self-reported general health, which probably fails to fully capture the psychological dimension of health, and the reliance on traditional socio-economic indicators, such as parental education or occupational status. The present study aimed at investigating this issue using simple questions to assess both the physical and psychological dimension of health and a broader set of socioeconomic indicators than previously used.