How does stigma impact discrimination against people with mental illnesses?
With stigma and misinformation comes the more serious problem of discrimination. If a person is known to have a mental illness, they may encounter a lot of difficulty getting a job or finding housing and transportation. On a larger scale, public funding and insurance coverage for mental health is often considerably less generous than other kinds of medical care, even though mental illnesses are extremely common—one in four Americans will experience a mental illness each year. For this reason, The Carter Center has been working for years to ensure parity in public funding and insurance coverage for mental health care.
