The Social Construction of Stigma: Utilizing Discursive Psychology for Advancing the Conceptualization of Stigma in Mental Health

In this article, we offer discursive psychology as a qualitative approach for the examination of stigma in mental health. Discursive psychology aims to closely examine conversational and textual data, most often everyday talk and institutional interactional data. This approach, heavily informed by conversation analysis and the early writings of sociologists such as Goffman and Garfinkel, offers new and innovative ways to examine the construct of stigma, which we illustrate. We suggest in this article that discursive psychology has not yet been fully leveraged for analyzing “stigma in practice” and therefore we provide guidance for scholars who wish to do so.