Too Close for Comfort: Stigma by Association in Family Members Who Live with Relatives with Mental Illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stigma by association is described in qualitative research of family members who have relatives diagnosed with mental illness, depicting their sense of public shame for having these relationship ties. However, there have been relatively few empirical studies thus far, in part due to the isolation of family members affecting research recruitment. In order to address this gap, an online survey was administered to 124 family members, comparing those who live in the same home with their ill relative (n = 81) and those who do not (n = 43). A remarkable incidence of one in three family members reported experiencing stigma by association. Those living with an ill relative reported comparatively higher levels of stigma by association using an adapted questionnaire measure. Both groups experienced loneliness (moderate levels), but importantly, the cohabiting relatives perceived themselves as lacking support from friends and other family members. Correlational analyses revealed that those with heightened stigma by association reported heightened anti-mattering: that is, feeling that other people treat them as if they are insignificant and invisible. Anti-mattering was also associated with more loneliness and reduced social support. Our discussion focuses on the theme that family members who actually live with mentally ill relatives experience heightened social isolation that is under-recognized due to public stigma concerns, compounded by feeling their own lives do not matter to others. Public health implications are considered for the stigmatized family members who appear to be particularly marginalized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".