I first encountered the stigma against psychotic illnesses when I told some friends I was schizoaffective. They sort of hmmmed and hawed, and over the next few months they got in touch less and less frequently, and then one day they stopped taking my phone calls and emails. I never heard from them again. All other things being equal, I have to believe it was my illness that freaked them out.

After that, the place where you see stigma is in job interviews. There was a period of my illness when I thought I would get a part-time job and try that, so I put in for a number of positions. I had a couple of job interviews, and then came the question: why is there a 3 year gap in your employment history?
Because I was screaming barking mad, and homeless.
You mean, like voices?
I paused, because I knew what they were thinking. Voices = guns = office massacre = everybody is dead. Then I said, yes, like voices.
Right! Well, we're interviewing a number of people, and we'll make our decision next Wednesday. If you don't hear from us, you didn't make the cut.
And I never did make the cut.

Family hasn't been overt about their stigma, but I post on Facebook about my illness from time to time, to heighten awareness of psychotic illnesses, and what happens is that nobody says anything about it. The posts just sit there, without response, as everybody ignores my illness.

I've had friends lately pushing me toward getting a part-time job again, but I've been down that road and know where it goes. Society doesn't like the mentally ill, it doesn't want the mentally ill, and it punishes the mentally ill by having the cops kill them. This is the ultimate and final stigma. This year in America, the cops killed 800 people. The media likes to bring lots and lots of attention to the 200 black people included in that number, but I want to highlight the 243 mentally ill people who were part of that total. The nazis had a program they called T4, which was to ship the mentally ill off to concentration camps and kill them. America does this informally by having the cops kill the mentally ill. Act a little squirrely in public, and your friendly local cop will blow you away.

Those are my thoughts on stigma for mental illness.