Stigma defined

To avoid the stigma and discrimination that may result from misinformation, one must avoid the casual use of race or ethnicity in research and design. Where ethnicity is relevant to a particular area of research, care must be taken to define and justify the use of race and ethnicity for the purpose of that research. As general public knowledge of the role of the gene in biology and in the practice of medicine increases, the definitions of race and ethnicity are likely to evolve to suit the proper, rather than the superficial, use of such concepts in social discourse. 

Portenoy and Payne (1997) insist upon a distinction between physical dependence and addiction. What they mean by physical dependence is roughly what 1 mean, but they define addiction as a condition in which one is unable to abstain "Use of the term addiction to describe patients who are merely physically dependent reinforces the stigma associated with opioid therapy and should be abandoned. If the clinician wishes to describe a patient who is believed to have the capacity for abstinence, the term physical dependency must be used (564). Since my second level of dependency, which I consider to be addiction proper, need not involve this inability, Portenoy and Payne are marking a different distinction. 

Psychosis is a difficult term to define and is frequently misused, not only in the newspapers and movies and on television, but unfortunately among mental health professionals as well. Stigma and fear surround the concept of psychosis and the... 

I understand the problem of the stigmas, but overcoming that is going to have to come from within. We must always remember that if you ever let anybody else define you, you have already lost the game. 

The use of environmental case studies, related to plastics waste, enables analysis of the extent to which contamination may adversely impact property value through the effect previously referred to and defined as environmental stigma [8]. 

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