During the medical specialization examination (TUS), the reactions given to me by my colleagues, mainly because I chose psychiatry, were as follows: "Are you going to be a mad doctor?". This was my first encounter with stigma. Stigmatizing expressions such as "crazy doctor, am I crazy?, you are crazy, you have become a Bakırköy, you are mentally ill, a crazy person cries every day" were frequently used not only in the doctor community but also among our people.
During my assistantship, I received an emergency call at 03:00 at night during my service shift. The information given by the emergency specialist was: "There is a schizophrenic patient in the emergency room, he will be taken into emergency surgery because he has appendicitis. Even though the patient is uneventful, the surgeon friend will approve the patient's hospitalization after you intervene." The female patient I saw in the emergency room had a 20-year history of schizophrenia and was compliant with her treatment, open to communication, and in a psychiatrically stable condition. Yes! He was also a person with schizophrenia and his appendix could burst. The problem was not with the patient, but with the stigmatizing approach of the surgeon friend.
Stigma (stigmatization) is a reference made by other members of the society that reduces the respect of the person, because the person is considered outside the "normal" standards of the society in which he lives. A shameful characteristic is attributed to the stigmatized person, without any basis in reality, which gives him/her a bad name.
Individuals with psychiatric disorders experience serious difficulties in being stigmatized. Both the patient and the patient's relatives are forced to hide the problems they experience. When they are stigmatized in society, they experience a result such as "one step up to nine, never down to eight", and even if they recover, they cannot save themselves from this stigma.
The basic condition for preventing stigmatization is education. As our ignorance about diseases decreases, such problems will no longer be experienced by our patients and their relatives. It is possible to regain our individuals, who were described as "the madman of the village, the madman of the neighborhood" and were excluded from society in the past. After all, we have people with psychiatric disorders who have achieved many successes, and there will be many more in the future, as long as they are not hindered by stigma.
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