I’d like to share an essay that I wrote at the start of the year for Youth Studies, which focuses on how the stigma surrounding mental illness has influenced and continues to influence my personal experience with mental illness. The stigma surrounding mental illness is one of the major social constructs impacting on the societal understanding of mental illness and affects the way in which individuals with mental illness are perceived and treated (Conrad & Barker). Goffman (1963) classes stigma as “a ‘mark’ that signals to others that an individual possesses an attribute reducing him or her from ‘whole and usual’ to ‘tainted and discounted’” (Pescosolido, 2013). The stigma associated with mental illness in current society, whilst illustrates the social fault lines of a society that produces such prejudice and discrimination, it also is negatively impacting those with mental illnesses. With the prevalence of mental illness in society today, especially prominent in y