Dealing with Stigma

Stigma can occur in a variety of settings

If you’re the parent of a child with a mental illness, odds are you and your family have already encountered stigma. While families are subject to stigma in a variety of different settings and situations, the parents we spoke with told us that they are most likely to report difficulty managing stigma at school, in the workplace, when accessing mental health treatment services, in the community, and sometimes even in their relationships with other family members.

Here are just a few examples of what stigma can look like.

Your child has difficulty coping with a lot of noise and commotion in the classroom. When your child has an outburst or has to leave the room, classmates comment or makes jokes.

Your attempts to help your child schedule playdates with classmates outside of school repeatedly fall flat. Despite a lot of hard work and planning on your part, playdate invitations are never reciprocated by other families.

Your efforts to advocate for your child at school are met with eyerolls or heavy sighs. You can tell by the reaction of teachers, staff, or other parents that you’ve been pegged as “that parent”—the parent who is constantly trying to make things better for their child (as if this was a bad thing).

You’re experiencing pushback from your employer or your colleagues at work. People aren’t happy about the fact that you’re constantly having to take time off from work, either to take your child to appointments or to troubleshoot problems at your child’s school.

You feel blamed and judged—as opposed to seen and supported—by the clinician who is working with your child. They suggest one-size-fits-all solutions that don’t actually work for your family and that leave you feeling like you’re doing everything wrong as a parent.

You find yourself on the receiving end of a lot of harsh comments when your child has a meltdown in public. Apparently, you’re a bad parent and your child is a brat—or at least that’s what random strangers would have you believe.

Other people (friends, neighbours, and maybe even members of your extended family) have unrealistic expectations about what is possible for your child or your family right now.

Being on the receiving end of stigma

hurts a lot

 Stigma can contribute to a sense of failure and shame, for parents and kids alike.

It can also fuel feelings of isolation and loneliness, with families feeling like they are being harshly judged or rejected by their communities entirely—a devastating thing to experience.

Repeated experiences with stigma may cause a family to decide to turn inward, either because it’s too much work to have to constantly explain what’s happening with their child or too stressful to deal with the fallout if your child happens to be having a bad day.

Stigma makes it so much harder to be a parent—or a kid.

What other families want you to know about dealing with stigma

While dealing with stigma is never easy, there are things you can do to make the situation more manageable for your child and your family. Here are a few strategies that have worked for other parents.

Look for opportunities to educate other people, ideally in a way that doesn’t feel too stressful or burdensome for your family. What you’re looking to do is to share your child or family’s experience in a confident and unapologetic way—in a way that says, “Everyone has their challenges—and this is ours. And this is what we need or what would help.”

Have an action plan for addressing stigma at your child’s school. Help the school to identify and secure funding for the kinds of supports that would help to make things better for children/youth living with mental illness (for example, access to an in-school child and youth worker, the opportunity to participate in a social and life skills group, mental health education sessions for peers, and so on). Don’t just count on the school to make suggestions. Bring your own ideas to the table.

Be prepared to address stigma in mental health treatment settings as well. Help clinicians to understand that certain therapeutic approaches can leave parents feeling stigmatized. If an entire treatment program is anchored in an assumption of parental shortcomings, parents can feel shamed and blamed right from the get-go.

Invest in relationships that feel safe and accepting. Surround yourself with trusted people who recognize just how much your child, and your family, has to offer. Sure, your child might need a little extra support getting and staying well, but they also deserve a lot of credit for working so hard to master strategies and coping skills that seem to come more easily and more naturally for other kids. Tapping into other people’s compassion and empathy can be a powerful way of eroding stigma.

Finally, recognize the importance of tapping into peer support. Being able to compare notes with other parents who truly get it isn’t just tremendously validating. It can also save you a lot of time and energy. You don’t have reinvent the wheel. You can tap into the wisdom of other parents.

Odds are yours isn’t the only family encountering stigma in a particular setting. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to join forces with other parents to try to improve the situation. There’s power in numbers, after all. Just be aware that privacy policies can sometimes make it challenging for parents to find one another and connect. You’ll want to look for opportunities to connect with these other parents via social media, at school/community events, or through mutual friends.

This article is written by Ann Douglas and is based on input from a group of parent volunteers with Parents for Children’s Mental Health. Their contributions are both acknowledged and deeply appreciated.