Jo C Phelan
Biographic Data
| ID | 262274 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jo C Phelan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jo C |
| FAMILY NAME | Phelan |
| SIGNATURE | PHELAN J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5031-4839 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6734 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 26 |
Stigma affects how parents respond to their children’s mental health, but does child gender complicate the story
Parents are influential gatekeepers to mental health services for children struggling with mental health issues, and their stigmatizing attitudes and behaviors towards mental illness may hinder help-seeking. Parents' gendered expectations throughout the help-seeking process may influence whether they pursue formal or informal support for their children. We advance stigma research by examining how stigma affects a parent's decision to seek formal …
Familial transmission of mental health help-seeking
Familial transmission of mental illnesses and health behaviors is well established. However, little research has examined familial transmission of mental health help-seeking behaviors despite social science theoretical traditions that support its occurrence including social learning theory and the network episode model. Among parent-adolescent dyads, extant literature supports consideration of adolescent-autonomy versus parent-gatekeeping accordi…
Socioeconomic-Status-Based Disrespect, Discrimination, Exclusion, and Shaming
Observing an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health reliably leads to the question, 'What are the pathways involved?' Despite enormous investment in research on the characteristics, behaviors, and traits of people disadvantaged with respect to health inequalities, the issue remains unresolved. We turn our attention to actions of more advantaged groups by asking people to self-report their exposure to disrespect, discrimination,…
Me” versus “them”
Mental illness stigma is a significant barrier to utilizing mental health services for young populations. Few studies have evaluated how specific stigma dimensions relate to help-seeking and recommendations among adolescents. We examined how the stigma dimensions of labeling, stereotypes, and separation/discrimination influenced self-reported help-seeking behaviors of adolescents and recommendations for hypothetical peers with a mental health pro…
Inequities gone or enduring? Evaluating the effects of a school-based antistigma intervention on race/ethnic and gender intersectional disparities in mental illness stigma
While significant mental illness stigma disparities across race/ethnicity and gender exist, little is known about the efficacy of anti-stigma interventions in reducing these intersectional disparities. We examine the two-year effects of school-based anti-stigma interventions on race/ethnic and gender intersectional stigma disparities among adolescents. An ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sixth grade sample ( N = 302) self-completed survey…
School Mental Health Curriculum Effects on Peer Violence Victimization and Perpetration
BACKGROUND: Addressing school violence is an important public health goal. To assess the role of school mental health curricula in violence prevention, we evaluated effects of an anti-stigma curriculum on violence victimization/perpetration. METHODS: An ethnically/socioeconomically diverse sample of 751 sixth-graders (mean age 11.5 years) across 14 schools in Texas were block-randomized by school (2011-2012) to receive singly or in combination: (…
Estimating School Race/Ethnic Enrollment Effects on Student Mental Health
Greater NL-White density increases mental health risk for NL-Black and low-stress Latinx students, while school diversity lowers risk for high-stress Latinx students. These findings demonstrate how educational settings may produce or lessen minority stress
Adolescent views of mental illness stigma
667; mean age = 11.5) self-completed assessments of their MI-related knowledge, positive attitudes, and behaviors toward peers with MI and adolescent vignettes described as experiencing bipolar (Julia) and social anxiety (David) symptoms. Self-reported race, ethnicity, and gender were combined to generate 6 intersectional composite variables: Latino boys, Latina girls, non-Latina/o (NL) Black boys, NL-Black girls, NL-White boys, and NL-White girl…
Influence and Social Distance Consequences across Categories of Race and Mental Illness
This paper describes an experimental study (N = 184) that investigated influence and social distance consequences of a number of attributes in interpersonal interactions. The attributes included race, education, panic disorder, depression, and schizophrenia. Participants interacted with fictitious partners whom they believed were real and who represented the attributes studied. Participants had opportunities to be influenced by and seek distance …
The Burden of Stigma on Health and Well-Being
Most individuals are stigmatized at some point. However, research often examines stigmas separately, thus underestimating the overall impact of stigma and precluding comparisons across stigmatized identities and conditions. In their classic text, Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships, Edward Jones and colleagues laid the groundwork for unifying the study of different stigmas by considering the shared dimensional features of stigma…
A comparison of status and stigma processes
In prior work, we proposed that the related processes of status differentiation and stigmatization both diminish the status of negatively labeled groups, but that only stigma also engenders social rejection, in part via appraisals of abnormality (Lucas, & Phelan, 2012, Phelan, Lucas, Ridgeway, & Tay
Parental recognition of preadolescent mental health problems
Impact of a community-level intervention on HIV stigma, homophobia and HIV testing in New York City
CHHANGE was feasible and acceptable to community residents. Evaluating community-level interventions is challenging. Our triangulated approach yielded somewhat conflicting results, which may be due to design limitations. Further research is needed to understand whether and how CHHANGE affected HIV testing
Changing attitudes towards obesity – results from a survey experiment
This study shows that media and public health campaigns may solidify beliefs that obesity is due to individual causes and consequently increase stigma when presenting individual behavior as a cause of obesity. Public health messages that emphasize the role of social environmental or genetic causes may be ineffective because of entrenched beliefs
Attitudes Toward Judicial Lenience and Government Assistance for Individuals With Mental Illness
A Social History of Disease
Fundamental cause theory posits that social inequalities in health arise because of unequal access to flexible resources, including knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections, which allow people to avoid risk factors and adopt protective factors relevant in a particular place. In this study, we posit that diseases should also be put into temporal context. We characterize diseases as transitioning through four stages at a…
The stigma of mental illness in the labor market
Trends in education gradients of 'preventable' mortality
Is Racism a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health
We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic raci…
Racial and mental illness stereotypes and discrimination
The Virginia Tech and Columbine High shootings are 2 of the deadliest school massacres in the United States. The present study investigates in a nationally representative sample how White Americans' causal attributions of these shooting moderate their attitudes toward the shooter's race. White Americans shown a vignette based on the Virginia Tech shooting were more likely to espouse negative beliefs about Korean American men and distance themselv…
Direct-to-Consumer Racial Admixture Tests and Beliefs About Essential Racial Differences
Although at first relatively disinterested in race, modern genomic research has increasingly turned attention to racial variations. We examine a prominent example of this focus—direct-to-consumer racial admixture tests—and ask how information about the methods and results of these tests in news media may affect beliefs in racial differences. The reification hypothesis proposes that by emphasizing a genetic basis for race, thereby reifying race as…
Stigma, status, and population health
Stigma power
When people have an interest in keeping other people down, in or away, stigma is a resource that allows them to obtain ends they desire. We call this resource “stigma power” and use the term to refer to instances in which stigma processes achieve the aims of stigmatizers with respect to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others. We draw on Bourdieu, 1987 , Bourdieu, 1990 who notes that power is often most effectively deployed when it is hi…
Fundamental Cause Theory
Labeling and Stigma
Conceptualizing Stigma
Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurren…
Social Conditions As Fundamental Causes of Disease
Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities
Link and Phelan (1995) developed the theory of fundamental causes to explain why the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. They proposed that the enduring association results because SES embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections that protect health no matt…
Is Racism a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health
We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic raci…
Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities
Bodies of research pertaining to specific stigmatized statuses have typically developed in separate domains and have focused on single outcomes at 1 level of analysis, thereby obscuring the full significance of stigma as a fundamental driver of population health. Here we provide illustrative evidence on the health consequences of stigma and present a conceptual framework describing the psychological and structural pathways through which stigma in…
Culture and stigma
Stigma power
When people have an interest in keeping other people down, in or away, stigma is a resource that allows them to obtain ends they desire. We call this resource “stigma power” and use the term to refer to instances in which stigma processes achieve the aims of stigmatizers with respect to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others. We draw on Bourdieu, 1987 , Bourdieu, 1990 who notes that power is often most effectively deployed when it is hi…
On Stigma and Its Consequences
Numerous studies have demonstrated a strong connection between the experience of stigma and the well-being of the stigmatized. But in the area of mental illness there has been controversy surrounding the magnitude and duration of the effects of labeling and stigma. One of the arguments that has been used to downplay the importance of these factors is the substantial body of evidence suggesting that labeling leads to positive effects through menta…
Fundamental Causes' of Social Inequalities in Mortality
Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant 'confounding variable' or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in …
Stigma and prejudice
Public conceptions of mental illness
OBJECTIVES: The authors used nationwide survey data to characterize current public conceptions related to recognition of mental illness and perceived causes, dangerousness, and desired social distance. METHODS: Data were derived from a vignette experiment included in the 1996 General Social Survey. Respondents (n = 1444) were randomly assigned to 1 of 5 vignette conditions. Four vignettes described psychiatric disorders meeting diagnostic criteri…
Controlling Disease and Creating Disparities
The United States and other developed countries experienced enormous improvements in population health during the 20th century. In the context of this dramatic positive change, health disparities by race and socioeconomic status emerged for several potent killers. Any explanation for current health disparities must take these changing patterns into account. Any explanation that ignores large improvements in population health and fails to account …
Lifetime and five-year prevalence of homelessness in the United States
OBJECTIVE. Intense debate exists concerning the number of homeless people in the United States. Previous studies, counting currently homeless people, have provided point-prevalence estimates of homelessness but have been criticized on methodological grounds. This study reports lifetime and 5-year prevalence estimates of homelessness using a different methodological approach. METHODS. Random-digit dialing was used to interview 1507 adults living i…
Trends in education gradients of 'preventable' mortality
Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ann Stueve, Bernice A. Pescosolido, Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996: What Is Mental Illness and Is It to be Feared?, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 188-207
Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma
One likely consequence of the genetics revolution is an increased tendency to understand human behavior in genetic terms. How might this 'geneticization' affect stigma? Attribution theory predicts a reduction in stigma via reduced blame, anger, and punishment and increased sympathy and help. According to 'genetic essentialist' thinking, genes are the basis of human identity and strongly deterministic of behavior. If such ideas are commonly accept…
The Stigma of Homelessness
Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Robert E. Moore, Ann Stueve, The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label "Homeless" on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 323-337
Education, Social Liberalism, and Economic Conservatism
De nombreuses etudes lient education et attitudes liberales comme la tolerance et le soutien aux libertes publiques. Les AA. evaluent cette perspective. Ils testent trois hypotheses : les attitudes liberales resultent soit du developpement cognitif et personnel soit de la socialisation directe soit d'un affinage ideologique. Celles-ci ne permettent pas de predire les attitudes sociales. Ils affirment que le mecanisme par lequel l'education influe…
Stigma, status, and population health
The Resources That Matter
A robust and very persistent association between indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) and the onset of life-threatening disease is a prominent concern of medical sociology. The persistence of the association over time and its generality across very different places suggests that no fixed set of intervening risk and protective factors can account for the connection. Instead, fundamental-cause theory views SES-related resources of knowledge, mo…
The Genomic Revolution and Beliefs about Essential Racial Differences
Could the explosion of genetic research in recent decades affect our conceptions of race? In Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that reports of specific racial differences in genetic bases of disease, in part because they are presented as objective facts whose social implications are not readily apparent, may heighten public belief in more pervasive racial differences. We tested this hypothesis with a multi-method study. A content analysis showe…
Stigma and Status
This article explicates and distinguishes the processes that produce status orders and those that produce stigmatization. It describes an experimental study in which participants were assigned interaction partners before completing a task where they had opportunities to be influenced by the partners and opportunities to socially reject the partners. Results show clear influence effects of educational attainment and mental illness but no effects f…
McKeown and the Idea That Social Conditions Are Fundamental Causes of Disease
In an accompanying commentary, Colgrove indicates that McKeown's thesis—that dramatic reductions in mortality over the past 2 centuries were due to improved socioeconomic conditions rather than to medical or public health interventions—has been “overturned” and his theory “discredited.” McKeown sought to explain a very prominent trend in population health and did so with a strong emphasis on the importance of basic social and economic conditions.…
A Social History of Disease
Fundamental cause theory posits that social inequalities in health arise because of unequal access to flexible resources, including knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections, which allow people to avoid risk factors and adopt protective factors relevant in a particular place. In this study, we posit that diseases should also be put into temporal context. We characterize diseases as transitioning through four stages at a…
The Paradox of the Contented Female Worker
The «paradox of the contented female worker» is that although women have jobs with lower pay and less authority than men, they are equally satisfied with their jobs and employers. This paradox is demonstrated in a sample of male and female professionals and managers. Five possible explanations of the paradox are assessed: 1) women's lesser job rewards are perceived as equitable because they are matched by lower job inputs; 2) women's lesser rewar…
The Paradox of the Contented Female Worker
The «paradox of the contented female worker» is that although women have jobs with lower pay and less authority than men, they are equally satisfied with their jobs and employers. This paradox is demonstrated in a sample of male and female professionals and managers. Five possible explanations of the paradox are assessed: 1) women's lesser job rewards are perceived as equitable because they are matched by lower job inputs; 2) women's lesser rewar…
Lifetime and five-year prevalence of homelessness in the United States
OBJECTIVE. Intense debate exists concerning the number of homeless people in the United States. Previous studies, counting currently homeless people, have provided point-prevalence estimates of homelessness but have been criticized on methodological grounds. This study reports lifetime and 5-year prevalence estimates of homelessness using a different methodological approach. METHODS. Random-digit dialing was used to interview 1507 adults living i…
Public knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about homeless people
Media reports suggest that the public is becoming impatient with the homeless—that so‐called “compassion fatigue” has gripped the nation. This characterization of public sentiment could have important policy consequences—restrictive measures can be justified by growing public impatience, and progressive housing policies seem infeasible within a hostile climate of opinion. But evidence to support the compassion fatigue notion is anecdotal. We exam…
Lifetime and five-year prevalence of homelessness in the United States
A 1990 household-based telephone survey of 1,507 people was followed up by surveying a subsample of those interviewed for the initial report. Results showed very high prevalence figures for homelessness, quite close to those found in the earlier survey. Moreover, using explicit and stringent definitions of literal homelessness and doubling up, most periods of homelessness were found to last for more than one month and, particularly with regard to…
Education, Social Liberalism, and Economic Conservatism
De nombreuses etudes lient education et attitudes liberales comme la tolerance et le soutien aux libertes publiques. Les AA. evaluent cette perspective. Ils testent trois hypotheses : les attitudes liberales resultent soit du developpement cognitif et personnel soit de la socialisation directe soit d'un affinage ideologique. Celles-ci ne permettent pas de predire les attitudes sociales. Ils affirment que le mecanisme par lequel l'education influe…
Social Conditions As Fundamental Causes of Disease
The Stigma of Homelessness
Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Robert E. Moore, Ann Stueve, The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label "Homeless" on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 323-337
On Stigma and Its Consequences
Numerous studies have demonstrated a strong connection between the experience of stigma and the well-being of the stigmatized. But in the area of mental illness there has been controversy surrounding the magnitude and duration of the effects of labeling and stigma. One of the arguments that has been used to downplay the importance of these factors is the substantial body of evidence suggesting that labeling leads to positive effects through menta…
Social Epidemiology and the Fundamental Cause Concept
Since the early 1800s, studies have consistently demonstrated that people higher in the socioeconomic hierarchy live longer than people of lower rank. One hypothesis for the persistence of this association is that people who are relatively better off are more able to avoid risks by adopting currently available protective strategies. In a partial test of this idea, the social distributions of two cancer screening tests—Pap smears and mammography—w…
Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health
Who are "the homeless"? Reconsidering the stability and composition of the homeless population
OBJECTIVES: This study assessed the extent to which the use of point-prevalence samples biases conclusions drawn about homeless people. METHODS: Three data sets and published research were used to examine the degree to which conditions leading to point-prevalence bias (turnover in the homeless population, variability in the persistence of homelessness, and associations between personal characteristics and persistence) characterize the homeless po…
Public conceptions of mental illness
OBJECTIVES: The authors used nationwide survey data to characterize current public conceptions related to recognition of mental illness and perceived causes, dangerousness, and desired social distance. METHODS: Data were derived from a vignette experiment included in the 1996 General Social Survey. Respondents (n = 1444) were randomly assigned to 1 of 5 vignette conditions. Four vignettes described psychiatric disorders meeting diagnostic criteri…
Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ann Stueve, Bernice A. Pescosolido, Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996: What Is Mental Illness and Is It to be Feared?, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 188-207
Stigma as a Barrier to Recovery
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether stigma affects the self-esteem of persons who have serious mental illnesses or whether stigma has few, if any, effects on self-esteem. METHODS: Self-esteem and two aspects of stigma, namely, perceptions of devaluation-discrimination and social withdrawal because of perceived rejection, were assessed among 70 members of a clubhouse program for people with mental illness at baseline an…
The Sociology of Mental Health
Conceptualizing Stigma
Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurren…
McKeown and the Idea That Social Conditions Are Fundamental Causes of Disease
In an accompanying commentary, Colgrove indicates that McKeown's thesis—that dramatic reductions in mortality over the past 2 centuries were due to improved socioeconomic conditions rather than to medical or public health interventions—has been “overturned” and his theory “discredited.” McKeown sought to explain a very prominent trend in population health and did so with a strong emphasis on the importance of basic social and economic conditions.…
Internalized stigma predicts erosion of morale among psychiatric outpatients
Measuring Mental Illness Stigma
The effectiveness of efforts designed to address mental illness stigma will rest on our ability to understand stigma processes, the factors that produce and sustain such processes, and the mechanisms that lead from stigmatization to harmful consequences. Critical to such an understanding is our capacity to observe and measure the essential components of stigma processes. This article is designed to assist researchers in selecting or creating meas…
Fundamental Causes' of Social Inequalities in Mortality
Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant 'confounding variable' or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in …
Fear of People with Mental Illnesses
Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the 'behavior hypoth…
Controlling Disease and Creating Disparities
The United States and other developed countries experienced enormous improvements in population health during the 20th century. In the context of this dramatic positive change, health disparities by race and socioeconomic status emerged for several potent killers. Any explanation for current health disparities must take these changing patterns into account. Any explanation that ignores large improvements in population health and fails to account …
Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma
One likely consequence of the genetics revolution is an increased tendency to understand human behavior in genetic terms. How might this 'geneticization' affect stigma? Attribution theory predicts a reduction in stigma via reduced blame, anger, and punishment and increased sympathy and help. According to 'genetic essentialist' thinking, genes are the basis of human identity and strongly deterministic of behavior. If such ideas are commonly accept…
Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health (Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research)
Stigma and its public health implications
Psychology (49 works) · Psychiatry (35 works) · Medicine (30 works) · Mental health (29 works) · Mental Health Treatment and Access (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Clinical Psychology (21 works) · Mental illness (19 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (15 works)