Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities

By M. Hatzenbuehler, J. Phelan, Bruce G. Link. American Journal of Public Health, 2013

2,293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bodies of research pertaining to specific stigmatized statuses have typically developed in separate domains and have focused on single outcomes at 1 level of analysis, thereby obscuring the full significance of stigma as a fundamental driver of population health. Here we provide illustrative evidence on the health consequences of stigma and present a conceptual framework describing the psychological and structural pathways through which stigma influences health. Because of its pervasiveness, its disruption of multiple life domains (e.g., resources, social relationships, and coping behaviors), and its corrosive impact on the health of populations, stigma should be considered alongside the other major organizing concepts for research on social determinants of population health.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a5c15a11d3e31772866ded9ec54f9c185c52010

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. R. Pearl
2. Bernice A. Pescosolido
3. Naomi F Sugie
4. Eszter Hargittai
5. John F. Dovidio
6. Jack K. Martin
7. V. Earnshaw
8. Kristin Turney

In Health

1. Naomi F Sugie
2. Eszter Hargittai
3. John F. Dovidio
4. Bernice A. Pescosolido
5. V. Earnshaw
6. Kristin Turney
7. Dan J Stein

In Social Psychology

1. Bernice A. Pescosolido
2. Naomi F Sugie
3. John F. Dovidio
4. Yueqin Huang
5. Jack K. Martin
6. V. Earnshaw
7. Pamela Y. Collins
8. R. Pearl

Citations in the corpus

• Weight Bias and Stigma: Public Health Implications and Structural Solutions (2018, background): “Stigma is broadly understood to be detrimental to the health of those who are targeted (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2013; Pascoe & Richman, 2009).”
• The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development. (2018, background): “87 The tendency to restrict choices for people deemed to be incapable of making decisions robs them of agency, which is an important component of wellbeing.”
• Beyond Incarceration: Criminal Justice Contact and Mental Health (2017, methodology): “Within the analysis sample, some independent variables are missing a small amount of values,4 and we multiply impute missing data using the Amelia package in R (Honaker, King, and Blackwell 2011).”
• The Stigma Complex (2015, background): “In fact, the focus on stigma as a cause of health disparities in population health, overall, represented a novel line of thinking in the current period (e.g., see special section of volume 103 of the American Journal of Public Health, of which Hatzenbuehler et al. 2013 is a part).”
• Unrealized potential: Exploring the digital disability divide (2016, background): “People with disabilities (PWD) are stigmatized and excluded in many domains of life, with consequences for their health and wealth (Shifrer, 2013; Hatzenbuehler et al., 2013).”
• What has economics got to do with it? The impact of socioeconomic factors on mental health and the case for collective action (2018, background): “Furthermore, stigma (a ubiquitous component of mental health difficulties), has been recognised as a fundamental cause of health inequalities (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2013).”
• The Health Stigma and Discrimination Framework: a global, crosscutting framework to inform research, intervention development, and policy on health-related stigmas (2019, background): “A few general stigma frameworks have also highlighted the influence of social and structural forces on the stigmatization process across socio-ecological levels [6, 9, 36].”