Stigma, mental illness, and COVID-19 from a frontline clinician perspective: a way to go against the grain?

A well-known insidious obstacle for patients with mental illness is stigma, linked to feelings of incomprehensibility, incurability, and dangerousness. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a relevant additional barrier for these patients, which contributed to their marginalization, quality of life reduction and diminished treatments feasibility. As part of a cross-sectional multidisciplinary project conducted in the psychiatric service of Biella, a northern Italy province, preliminary data were collected by frontline clinicians during the COVID-19 first wave regarding the vicious cycle that may have been created between stigma and psychiatric patients in COVID-19 time.