Browsing by Author "Ukkonen, Emilia"

Mental health patients face a great deal of prejudice and discrimination in their lives. One of the highly stigmatized disorders is schizophrenia, and it’s stigma can hinder patients’ lives in several ways. Self-stigmatization is a phenomenon in which patients end up internalizing the public stigma. Research has mostly been focused on stigma, but self-stigma has started to attract scientists’ attention recently as well. The aim of this literature review is to examine self-stigma and the effect it might have on the lives of people with schizophrenia. The self-stigma of patients with schizophrenia has been found out to be strong and its degree is associated with different psychosocial and clinical outcomes. Increased self-stigma is associated with lower self-esteem and self-efficacy. It has also found out to be positively correlated with social avoidance and non-adherence to treatment. The severity of schizophrenia symptoms appears to be associated with self-stigma but the results are a bit unclear if positive and negative symptoms are treated separately. Self-stigma might mediate the association between lack of insight and different negative outcomes. There is some preliminary evidence of treatment methods, and cognitive and narrative methods along with methods focusing on empowerment might prove to be effective to reduce self-stigma. Further research on the associations mentioned in this review would be necessary since the knowledge of the mechanisms behind these associations is scarce and according to these results, self-stigma may reduce patients’ quality of life. With efficient interventions, it could be possible to promote patients’ mental well-being.