Mental Health Stigma: The View of NGOs in Lebanon : A Qualitative Study into NGOs Working with Mental Health in a Stigmatized Environment ; Stigma kring psykisk hälsa : En studie om icke-statliga organisationer erfarenheter av psykist ohälsa i Lebanon

Mental health stigma remains a pervasive issue in many societies, deeply influencing individuals' willingness to seek help and affecting the quality of care they receive. This paper focuses on the perspective of social service workers and those working within Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to discuss how extensive and impactful mental health stigma is in Lebanon, a country long devastated by civil war, economic disarray and faced with the world's strongest, non-nuclear bomb (Amos & Rincon, 2020, October 5). It employs semi-structured interviews of multiple Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)/social service workers to help answer how prevalent mental health stigma is in Lebanon today, and how these individuals and their organizations work with and around the stigma to help spread awareness around mental health. Grounded in Ervin Goffman’s Theory of Stigma, The Theory of Stigmatization by Blom et al (2022), and Pryor and Reeder's Four Categories of Stigma, the study tries to explain the complex nature of stigma around mental health in Lebanon. The results emphasize the complexity that NGO workers working with mental health are faced with when working within environments that have high stigma around mental health. It further shows how the NGOs need to tailor their approaches based on whether they are working within a rural or urban setting. Most notably it delves into how working with key figures on local levels, such as local leaders known as mukhtars and shewish, as well as religious clergy, often is a necessity. The results also delve into the role that social media has in both spreading stigma, and how it can, and often is a tool for increased accessibility between NGOs and the general public. The research contributed to a deeper understanding of the challenges NGOs have to navigate when working with a sensitive subject, such as mental health illness and the stigma around it, and offers practical recommendations for how to increase awareness and improve advocacy for mental health in stigmatized ...