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20 minute presentation/topic discussion | 40 minutes of deeper conversation & support

Wang et al. (2010) revealed that people with impairments have always tended to be less represented in the workplace.
Stigma against the blind was found to be less acceptable than stigma against obesity or mental illness, as these latter categories are often seen to be the fault of the person (Wang et al., 2010).
Larson and Corrigan (2010) discovered that people from rural settings are more likely to stigmatize mental illness than others.
Corrigan et al. (2010) found that individuals who openly identified that they had a mental illness reduced their self-stigma and enhanced their quality of life.
Sowell and Phillips (2010) revealed that fear of negative social consequences discouraged people from revealing their problems, and this lack of transparency with others often leads to further psychological problems.

Mental Illness Stigma and the Job Market

What do you think? Would you hire somebody with a mental illness? What if it was bipolar? manic depression being the same thing what about schizophrenia how about Down syndrome to dive deeper into the topic today

I will actually be presenting on some of the research I did a trip in college my undergrad Institute so let's get started I have a PowerPoint here that I printed out and I will post online and I titled the presentation the effects of mental illness stigma on higher ability or the likeliness to get hired or ability to get hired and the purpose of the research was to explore of having a mental illness plays a role in job applications to create a replication of a previous study that a classmate of mine had done year a couple of years back and to increase my understanding and the understanding of other people regarding the relationship of discrimination between people so previous research by Wang Baran and able in 2010 reported that people with impairments have always tended to be less represented in the workplace an employer might see a disabled person as having positive qualities but this did not equate the likeliness to hire and at the same time discrimination varies in relationship to the type of disability where it is less socially acceptable to discriminate against somebody with blindness for example than it is more socially acceptable to discriminate against somebody for being obese or for having depression because the latter are seen in some ways by some people as a moral Fair failing our character flaw you know snap out of it or just exercise or and that blindness is something that's not one's fault and so people are more understanding and less stigmatizing some other research on 2010 by Corrigan found that individuals who openly identified with the mental illness we're kind of out about it reduce their self stigma the internalized stigma and enhance their quality of life at the same time Seoul and Phillips into ten revealed that fear of negative social consequences discourage people from revealing their problems and unfortunately this could lead to further psychological problems so it's kind of a catch-22 damned if you do damned if you don't but the research showing that if you are in an environment that can support you being out about having a mental health condition that that can be better for your overall mental health so my hypothesis in the study was that perception that an applicant has a mental illness will decrease selecting a said employer will hire that person so the method that I used was to have a description of a job applicant and handed it out to people and the last line some of the surveys would say an Mis job applicant has a mental health condition that they're seeking treatment for any other ones the control would not have that so I wanted to see if the ratings of likeliness to hire that person would have vary and thankfully I did not find a significant difference which could potentially mean that the stigma has decreased or there could be other flaws of the study the previous research that I was replicating it on they had four different conditions a control describing somebody as bipolar another one that's not depressive and another one as just a general mental health condition and that previous research actually did show significant difference so that there wasn't stigma that got picked up I guess I can just kind of do a brief little here's the survey and you can see just a description of a job applicants and then you know right over there on the last line we kind of talked about if they have you know a mental health condition or not and then we have the Likert type scale rating to see if they would be willing to hire that person so I also have a little graph here no significant difference with the is that called again variation the standard deviation the variability lines in there and so let's see further research is definitely gonna have to continue to examine this heard you know though anecdotal from some other people that they have been discriminated against for having a mental health condition yeah so that's that's this one segment here and I will stop this one and we'll transition to the next segment hi we are back and I want to describe a little bit about the process of stigma so imagining in the external environment that somebody is saying oh hello I'm stigma don't mind me I'm just about to creep into your mind and all these different things are things that can get internalized by the person I'm worthless I'm not good enough I just need to snap out of it and that's how the external stigma becomes internalized and kind of sits right down here you know you can't just turn off depression and there's their social forces at work that make it hard to recover even because people are hesitant to seek help so I do encourage anyone struggling with a mood disorder or any other mental health condition to definitely take the risk to find the right people that can help you and that it can be a benefit in the long term it can be hard to begin with and very outside of your comfort zone but help is available so hang in there and then just to talk a little bit more about how that actual process of external to internal stigma happens have this other chart here and again I'll link these but first we become aware that the public believes people with mental illness are weak or stupid or whatever it is and we start to agree with them we'll hear it enough and then we start to apply it to ourselves well it must be true for me and that's when the harms just come in because I am weak then all these other negative beliefs start spiraling out of control person gives up trying to hold a job to have friends to get help because they think nothing's gonna change basically it's learned helplessness and so what are we gonna do about this we have the stigma it kind of splits a person in half between who they are are who they were and this this llll part of them themselves and so this understanding stigma chart that I found suggests that through openness dialog tolerance and empathy we're going to be able to help heal people and connect and so they'll be able to share understanding with others with themself and ultimately find healing that way and that will be a process that requires time and efforts and it'll take start with personal change leading to social change so you can take the time to be open to somebody with a mental illness like depression and have a dialogue about it what it's like for them and not you know push against them to maybe even move from tolerance to acceptance and empathy and compassion that that is the bridge that will help heal the split that mentally ill people have had to deal with so thank you for following along on that so that concludes our discussion of stigma and being hired on the job market while having a mental health condition please feel free to chime in in the comments if you have encountered any prejudice stereotyping and discrimination in the workplace or otherwise and feel free to subscribe and I'm also available in San Francisco for a therapy in person or to anyone in California by online video thank you very much for your time and I hope you have a wonderful day take care.

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