Stigma, prejudice, discrimination and health.

There is a great urgency to understand more fully the linkages between stigma, prejudice, discrimination and health to aide in the development of effective public health strategies. A goal of the US Healthy People 2010 programme is to eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population (DHHS, 2002). Prejudice and discrimination are believed to be important contributors to the production of health disparities (IOM, 2002). It is difficult to pick up a consensus report on mental illness or HIV/AIDS without finding numerous references to the ways the stigmatization of these health conditions undercuts prevention and treatment efforts (DHHS, 2003; USAID, 2000). For this reason, in September 2006, the Health & Society Scholars Working Group on Stigma, Prejudice, Discrimination and Health convened scholars across the social and health sciences who study the social and psychological processes of stigmatization and prejudice. The objective of this conference was to strengthen collaboration across disciplines, discuss challenging conceptual issues, and identify the most pressing research objectives facing this relatively new line of inquiry. Driving discussions was the budding idea for a Special Issue that would attempt to bridge disparate research traditions in stigma, on the one hand, and in prejudice and discrimination on the other. As editors of the Special Issue, we believe the importance of this endeavor lies in missed opportunities for conceptual coherence and for capitalizing on insights generated from each research tradition and possibly, to an underestimation of the impact of stigma and prejudice on health. Several exciting manuscripts emerged from the conference making up the content of this Special Issue. The Special Issue breaks from existing volumes in fundamental ways. To date, manuscript collections on stigma and those on prejudice and discrimination are organized around a single disciplinary perspective and focus on either stigma or prejudice but never both. Authors included in the Special Issue write from diverse disciplinary perspectives and represent a starting point of cooperation among scholars interested in these two traditions. The articles develop conceptual and empirical research linking stigma and prejudice; identify under-recognized cultural and policy dynamics that contribute to the formation of stigma and prejudice and may mediate their health impacts; describe pathways through which stigma and prejudice affect health outcomes; and explore the implications of these themes for public health practice. In this commentary, we explain why these themes are important and introduce articles in the Special Issue.