Staff Perspective: How Do We Define Stigma and How Long Should We Let Stigma Define Mental Health?
Stigma is relative, socially and culturally determined, and dynamic. Consequently, stigma is a difficult concept to operationally define. This is important because definitions shape and directly impact efforts to research and reduce stigma. In 2014, the RAND National Defense Research Institute published an extensive assessment of stigma-reduction strategies within the DoD (Acosta et al., 2014).