Rethinking Stigma
by Emily Kibler | March 31, 2025
In recent years, the term “stigma” has become a buzzword that, regardless of a person’s ideologies, seems to follow all of us around. For some, it serves as a powerful tool for education and awareness. For others, however, the word has lost its meaning. Stigma has become a shorthand that allows for an easy way to discuss social stereotypes without delving into complicated subjects and personal matters. In that way, stigma is—and will continue to be—an incredibly useful word. By now, most conversations about disabilities include the word “stigma” at some point; its effects are inescapable.
Using Stigma to Talk About the Past
One of the main ways that the word “stigma” is used is to allow people to talk about their personal experiences without having to frame them as sources of shame or embarrassment. For example, instead of saying, “It took me a while to start taking Depression meds because I was embarrassed to admit that I needed help,” a person could instead say, “It took me a while to start taking Depression meds because of their stigma.” This is a much easier conversation, but is it necessarily better?
By framing events of the past using stigma as a catch-all term, we lose some of the depth of difficult situations. Rather than providing specific reasons for why a situation was challenging, this example assumes that the person who is being addressed knows how medications are stigmatized. Even further, it assumes that all people experience similar enough types of stigma that simply saying the word will allow someone to accurately fill in the blanks. In trying to make the conversation easier, we risk erasing the intricate, lived realities behind these experiences.
The Benefits of Widespread Knowledge About Stigma
Despite its downsides, one of the positive outcomes of the term’s increased popularity is that it has created space for people to reflect on their internalized biases. Without an understanding of stigma, a person going through a mental health crisis might keep their pain to themselves because they are ashamed or feel week. Understanding stigma won’t magically correct this, but it might allow someone to move past the discomfort and take small steps toward seeking help. If it takes a Facebook infographic about stigma to help someone feel seen and be comfortable reaching out for help, I will gladly scroll past as many posts as it takes.
However, this broader awareness must also serve as a stepping stone, not the final goal. Understanding stigma is only the first part of the equation. The real challenge is confronting how stigma translates into real-world barriers to access, including discrimination and exclusion.
The Complexity of Stigma
One of the most significant drawbacks of using the term “stigma” is that it doesn’t fully capture the complex interaction between internalized stigma and the actions of others based on their own internalized stigma.
While I normally avoid using first-person in these articles, I want to share a personal experience to illustrate this point more clearly.
When I first started using a wheelchair, I encountered stigma in ways I didn’t expect. I am ashamed to admit that I felt relief when I broke my hand and had to wear a cast because it made me look injured rather than disabled. Part of this stemmed from my own faulty perception of disability, but another real part was due to the perceptions of others. Prior to the cast, many people avoided talking to me—not out of malice, but just because they didn’t know what to say. The cast gave them something to mention that went beyond asking “What happened to you?” or “What is wrong with you?” In many ways, breaking my hand took the awkwardness out of my social interactions with strangers.
I tell this story to show how complicated stigma can be. It wasn’t just my own internalized ableism that made me nervous about being in a wheelchair; it was the stigma that others held and how it influenced their actions. Scared of saying something wrong, many people chose to avoid speaking to me at all. If this had only happened once or twice, I might not have noticed, but the pattern became undeniable. However, there was no way for the people on the other side to know that they weren’t the only ones avoiding me like an elephant in the room.
It would be easy to explain my relief at having a cast as simply a symptom of my own internalized stigma. However, that would undervalue my real experience. Yes, I had internalized ableism that I needed to break down, but my fears about being judged were also valid. The stigmas that others held about my situation guided their actions, which had tangible effects in my life.
Self-stigma is especially difficult to overcome because so much of it is reinforced by the reality of how others perceive disability. To move forward, we need to adopt a dual approach: we must address both the internalized stigmas we hold about ourselves and the larger, societal stigmas that shape the way others treat us.
Shifting Beyond Stigma
Stigma cannot be discussed in a vacuum. When we focus solely on stigma, we risk framing the issue as one that can be solved by changing individual attitudes or encouraging people to think differently. While challenging stigma is essential, it doesn’t directly address the barriers that people with disabilities face in their everyday lives.
We must expand the conversation around stigma to include the ways that it interacts with discrimination and marginalization. Likewise, conversations about discrimination are incomplete if they don’t acknowledge the role of stigma in perpetuating exclusion.
Takeaways
If we truly want to reduce the stigma surrounding disability, we must confront not only the personal biases that exist but also the structures that perpetrate them. In recent years, the conversation about stigma has helped individuals become more aware of their internalized biases and encouraged people to open up about personal struggles. But this cannot be where the conversation ends. We need to confront the way that stigma intersects with—and often fuels—discriminatory practices in every corner of society.
It’s time to move beyond using stigma as a blanket term and acknowledge that the issue isn’t just what people think about disability, but what they do because of those beliefs. Only then will we be able to shift the narrative towards creating a society that is not only free of stigma but also truly inclusive.
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