The stigma attached to mental illness and all that is related to it – patients who suffer from mental disorders, their families, psychiatric institutions, psychotropic medications – is the main obstacle to better mental health care and better quality of life of people who have the illness, of their families, of their communities and of health service staff that deals with psychiatric disorders. It is a basic component of the negative discrimination that people with mental illness experience every day. It blocks access to facilities and options that, in principle at least, have been created to help people impaired by mental illness. Stigma is pernicious and what is worse there are indications that despite advances of psychiatry and medicine stigma continues to grow and has more and more often terrible consequences for patients and families.

The stigma associated with schizophrenia is particularly harsh. A person diagnosed with the illness will be seen by most of those around him or her as dangerous, lazy, incompetent at work, unable to be a family member that fulfills his or her social obligations. Different fears and prejudicial judgments may be in the foreground of stigma in different cultural settings: what is common is that the negative opinion will stay stable even after all the symptoms of the disease have disappeared and after it has been possible to show that the individual concerned can work and fulfill his social roles at least as well as his fellow citizens.