Stigma During a Pandemic

Stigma gets a lot of bad press in psychology when it keeps people from seeking therapy or when it is overgeneralized. Seeking therapy is a sign that there is something wrong with you, and efforts to combat stigma by saying that there is nothing wrong with therapy patients utterly miss the point. In fact, that attitude is often what went wrong in the first place, where children who needed to learn how to improve or to accept themselves as mediocre were told by friends and family that they were already perfect just the way they were. Or, they got the message that it’s so humiliating to need improvement that they should pass themselves off as perfect.

The stigma of seeking therapy is not that there is something wrong with you, it’s that what is wrong with you is a character flaw. And, to be honest, that too is a correct assessment. Therapy, except for transient symptoms, is supposed to improve your character. But so what? Can’t everyone use a little character improvement?

The bigger problem, then, keeps going back to the idea that it is horrible to have a weakness, a flaw, or a need for improvement. When an athlete gets coaching, it’s an acknowledgment that there is room for improvement, but it doesn’t sound like the athlete is defective. Therapy is for people who have room for improvement; it doesn’t mean they are defective.

You see the devastating implications of needing improvement when people say that ugly people are really beautiful, that dull people are really smart, or that old people are really young. These supposed compliments communicate that it is so horrid to be ugly, dull, or old that these indicia of imperfection are unbearable. It’s much healthier to recognize how attractive, intelligent, or old one is, and to (mainly) accept it. I say “mainly” because there are things you can do to make yourself more attractive and smarter (but not younger).

Thus, there is a lot of confusion about how to think about human imperfections. Some say they are not imperfections at all. Some scoff at them as if they themselves have none. A better way is to acknowledge the ubiquity of imperfections and to try to either accept them or improve them.

Technically, a stigma is an identity element—something you’ve done or something about you—that disqualifies you from playing a particular social role. The most troublesome stigmas are the ones that keep you from playing the role of human being.

It has always been true that a mild runny nose disqualifies people from playing the role of restaurant waiter but not the role of restaurant customer. In the pandemic, it would disqualify both (if restaurants were open).

Stigma has a positive function that must be understood and appreciated if its negative effects are to be managed more benignly. A good example is the speed with which physical proximity has become stigmatized in a world concerned about infection. In the liquor store recently, signs on the door asked customers to keep their distance from employees and each other. Tape on the floor showed people how to line up at 6-foot intervals. One man got in line right behind a woman, and people, including me, glared at him as if he had ogled her or molested her. She herself was oblivious. It’s hard to keep new social rules in mind, but our glaring had its desired effect, and he took a couple steps back. Our glaring communicated, technically, that his proximity to the other customer disqualified him in the role of customer. If he hadn’t moved, he would soon have been disqualified from the role of human being, with concomitant (and possibly accurate) ideas about why he was so indifferent to social cues. By “role of human being,” I mean in the sense of the social contract, not in the biological sense.

Being Chinese is a good example of the kind of stigma that gets out of hand. Some people react to a Chinese appearance as if it were as reliable an indicator of infection as sniffles are, or as if it were a reliable indicator of blame for the appearance of the virus. Sniffles, of course, are also not a perfect indicator of infection, much less of coronavirus infection. We learn a lot about stigma by considering how careful we are not to clear our throats in public now, since we don’t want to be mistaken for the stigmatized group. “Chinese” has become associated with “virus” through classical conditioning after stories about Wuhan. The link between looking Chinese and COVID-19 is very weak and getting weaker, but stigma stays strong partly because it gives stigmatizers something to do, anxiety being a fear where it is unclear what one is afraid of or what to do about it. The analogy to the internment of people of Japanese ancestry after Pearl Harbor is not hard to spot.

One of the great tragedies of the way stigma works is related to the fact that people will stay away from people with sniffles, or from people who look Chinese, and then feel bad about the way they are treating the other person. For many people, shunning other people is itself a stigma, a behavior that disqualifies one from playing the role of Christian or good person. To justify our treatment of others, we may create or buy into a narrative that demonizes the other person to the point where the role of human being is revoked and the stigmatized person is considered to be subhuman. Thus, people think or say that those with sniffles should quarantine themselves and are selfish for going out for a walk, and people say or think to themselves that Chinese people are subhuman because of cultural or dietary practices. (Every cultural community eats things that other cultural communities find disgusting.) Once we stigmatize someone, we maintain our sense of our own humanity by demonizing the stigmatized. Otherwise, we are a worse person for thinking so poorly of someone who is merely human.