Communities and Priority Groups

To challenge stigma and discrimination, we need to understand where it comes from, what purpose it serves and why it still exists. 

We work alongside communities and groups across Scotland to understand how they experience mental health stigma in combination with other forms of discrimination, such as racism and homophobia.

Our Communities and Priority Groups team is committed to developing meaningful community partnerships, exploring how different forms of stigma and discrimination co-exist and interact, and how this affects people.   

To do this, we are increasingly taking an intersectional approach.  Intersectionality – a term coined by American scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw – acknowledges that people experience life if different ways, and that this is influenced by a web of interconnected identities and interactions with power imbalances in society. Different forms of discrimination, and systems of power, influence this – for example, racism, classism ableism, homophobia and sexism.

We work in partnership with communities and organisations across Scotland to centre the voices of people who have faced and resisted intersectional mental health stigma alongside other forms of oppression to help influence meaningful and long-term change.