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No description available.

Infertility affects millions of women in the United States and across the globe. Research has identified negative psychological outcomes of infertility (depressive and anxiety symptoms). Many women (and men) report infertility as the most upsetting event in their lives. Regardless of which partner is infertile, women report questioning their self worth, experience guilt, and feel responsible. Specific reasons why these negative outcomes occur are not well understood. The goals of this study were to examine women’s perceived infertility stigma and explore its role in psychological functioning. Perceived stigma can include shame, embarrassment, or fear of rejection related to holding a stigmatizing attribute. Infertility may be stigmatizing for women given the majority are socialized to want children, and motherhood still is considered women’s primary social role. Feeling of inadequacy or inferiority may result when women perceive themselves as not measuring up to societal expectations or to their own expectations as women. The present study, the first to examine infertility stigma using direct, quantitative methods, included development of a perceived infertility measure, and a pilot test of the measure to examine its relation to psychosocial outcomes. Nine women with infertility from Appalachia were interviewed in-depth. Fully recorded and transcribed interviews were coded for stigma-related content; scale items were developed from this content. The initial 87 items were pilot tested on a sample of women with infertility. Results showed that women report a variety of experiences including perceiving themselves as inferior or less of a woman, trying to keep infertility a secret from others, and being treated differently including in a patronizing way. Women also reported fearing rejection from others including their partners. Details of scale development and preliminary results of pilot testing, including initial validation of the new scale, will be discussed.

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This conceptual article has 2 major goals. The first goal is to explain the benefits of conducting comprehensive studies of resilience for adults who have a stigmatizing condition or who have a family member or close friend with a stigmatizing condition. The second goal is to propose a model that illuminates how 3 perceptual components of self-stigmatization (concordant/discordant views of self, balance of power, and social distance) mediate the change toward resilience on an ongoing basis in varying social contexts through the development of competence, compassion for others, and self-compassion. Competence, compassion for others, and compassion for self potentially moderate the harmful effects of self-stigmatization, fit with the overarching themes required for resilience and self-determination, and underscore the critical need to implement and sustain widespread changes in communities, society, and culture.

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Stigma has long been associated with disease and illness, whether communicable or non-communicable, chronic or acute. In a medical context where the physical signs of disease and ‘sick’ behaviours help everyday people and medical professionals identify and segregate the infected from the uninfected, stigmatizing behaviours can sometimes be productive because they can limit the spread of disease and save lives. And yet, scholarly research and everyday discussions about health-related stigma often emphasize its counterproductive outcomes, such as when stigma discourages or undermines testing, treatment and other public health interventions. Like people living with HIV/AIDS, zombies, vampires and werewolves which are found in fictional narratives experience a variety of stigmatizing behaviours. They are diagnosed as ‘sick’ or ‘diseased’, labelled and stereotyped as dangerous and contagious, and separated physically as well as rhetorically from human beings. They are also quarantined, ridiculed, experimented on, and executed by medical professionals, military and law enforcement officials, and everyday citizens. While the zombie narrative has been useful for understanding the outbreak of disease and the spread of a global pandemic, when the nature of a disease changes from acute to chronic and is of a prolonged nature, these narratives are less useful. Instead, more sympathetic ‘monsters’ such as the vampire and the werewolf can act as a vehicle for understanding that disease does not equal death. Using the vampires and werewolves of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series as a case study, this research explored the role of monster metaphors and storytelling in popular culture as a health communication intervention strategy for challenging the counterproductive stigma outcomes experienced by those living with a chronic, transmissible disease. The analysis of the Anita Blake series conducted in this dissertation clarifies how stigma could be presented in popular culture narratives to account for both the experience of stigma and the stigmatized experience of those living with chronic, infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS. In particular, three criteria were identified in the series that lay the foundation for creating a productive learning opportunity for understanding chronic, transmissible illness and disease: the use of health-related indicators linking ‘monstrous’ conditions with the diagnosis of illness or disease; the presence of all of the steps in the stigma process; and, the inclusion of a variety of differential and discriminatory responses to ‘monstrous’ characters by the medical, legal and social systems present within the fictional world. When these criteria are met, monster narratives can achieve three objectives. First, they can demonstrate how structural and public stigma behaviours – whether differential or discriminatory – impact individuals and groups who are recipients of such treatment through the generation of self-stigma. Second, they draw attention to the counterproductive stigma outcomes that result from self-stigma sentiments. Third, they can show how groups and individuals generate productive stigma outcomes through a variety of stigma management practices. This analysis also led to important precisions to the existing understanding of the process of health-related stigma and stigma-related behaviours that may not have been possible without popular culture. In particular, it was determined that for those being stigmatized, it matters little whether treatment is differential or discriminatory for the effect on the individual or group is the same – the internalization of stigma and the generation of self-stigma sentiments. It was also confirmed that stigma management practices can result in both counterproductive and productive outcomes and, finally, it was possible to identify four personas that emerged from these outcomes: ‘villains’, ‘victims’, ‘survivors’ and ‘thrivers’.