Second Order Stigma: How Diagnoses as Identities Create a Paradox of Liberation

This essay is rooted in philosophical reflection on clinical and cultural observation. It follows the hermeneutic-interpretive tradition and its epistemic ambition is interpretive understanding. The argument proceeds by observation, inference and speculation; and its object of knowledge is the social circulation and transformation of meaning. It offers an abductively reasoned reading of a particular cultural phenomenon concerning the social stigma attached to psychiatric conditions. As an interpretation it is answerable to coherence, to fidelity to the phenomena, and to interpretive yield. The mechanism it describes may be called Second Order Stigma.