Blog: Making places stigma free for everyone 

If you follow Time to Talk Day you'll probably know that it’s always been about encouraging open conversations around our mental health. 

It's become a staple in the campaigns calendar right across the UK.  

But what if talking isn’t safe?   

Stigma and discrimination in all its forms has become mainstreamed into political and public discourse. People living with a mental health problem or illness are being dehumanised by powerful public figures, and media coverage or portrayals of mental illness are often inaccurate and damaging – many people continue to experience stigma and discrimination in the very places where we should all feel safe. Relationships, healthcare, education, employment – these are often hostile places when you live with a diagnosis. As one See Me supporter told us: 

“If we truly want people to talk, we must also ensure that speaking does not come with fear of consequence.”  

That's why this year’s theme for Time to Talk Day is ‘making places stigma free for everyone’. It recognises that stigma and discrimination pave the way for human rights abuses and is a fundamental barrier to good mental health outcomes – it recognises that as long as stigma and discrimination happen, safe conversations may not always be possible if you live with a mental health problem or illness.  

I’m not saying an open conversation isn’t a good thing. Having the time and space for a safe help-seeking help-giving conversation can be a first step lifeline in your mental health journey. Normalising mental health conversations is an important part of understanding your whole self, understanding and advocating for fair access and experience of services and support, having control and agency over your life, and finding peace in the presence or absence of symptoms. Mental health literacy – and having the confidence to use it - can be life changing, and we’ll always support and encourage these important conversations. 

But as Scotland’s national programme to end mental health stigma and discrimination, it’s important to recognise that some of the messaging from previous Time to Talk Day campaigns feels at odds with the reality of living with a mental health problem or illness.

It doesn’t speak to the harmful consequences of the stigma and discrimination people face everyday.

We know this from the findings of the Scottish Mental Illness Stigma Study, which collected the experiences of people living with complex and enduring mental illness. The research painted a bleak picture of the nature, scale and impact of mental health stigma. It’s a distressing account of people being prevented from accessing the most basic healthcare, losing jobs, having no say in treatment plans, being discredited in the justice system, and pathologising LGBT identity: 

“I have also had it recorded in my notes that being LGBT is proof of ‘unstable sense of self’, as well as dressing androgynously”. 

In mental healthcare settings, SMISS participants told us about withdrawing from services because of previous experiences of stigma - 80% of respondents had avoided getting help for their mental illnesses; 75% of respondents had avoided getting help from mental healthcare professionals; and 75% had avoided revealing the severity of their mental illnesses. Worryingly, many respondents had avoided seeking emergency treatment because of past experiences and anticipation of a repeat of poor or traumatising treatment.  

And that’s the pattern generally across all of the 14 life areas explored in the study – bad experiences, anticipation, withdrawal. All of this can lead to worsening mental health and poorer outcomes. 

It’s widely accepted that stigma and discrimination is a fundamental cause of health inequalities. For context, people living with a complex and enduring mental illness have a shortened life expectancy of between 15 and 20 years compared to the general population. Just to be clear, 95% of those deaths are from physical conditions (not suicide as many people assume). Around two thirds of these are from preventable causes - by conditions such as cancer, respiratory, cardiovascular and liver disease. The gap is persistent and widening especially for conditions like schizophrenia.  

SMISS provides valuable insight into people’s experiences in healthcare (and other settings), and offers some explanation for why there are such poor co-occurring physical outcomes including things like diagnostic overshadowing, when serious physical health problems are dismissed by clinicians: 

“My cardiac arrhythmia took three years to diagnose as they kept telling me it was my mental health and didn’t investigate… They were very wrong… I was at risk of stroke just because they refused to believe me. It’s very difficult to get people to believe you when you have a mental health diagnosis as they presume you aren’t truthful/ attention/medication seeking." 

Data on premature deaths isn’t broken down in a way that shows the impact for adversely racialised people. 

This breakdown of data is really important because in tackling mental health stigma and discrimination, we need to think critically about the different ways it's experienced by marginalised people and groups – like Nina whose experience was investigated by The Ferret and Migrant Women Press. 

You can read Nina’s full story here (content warning). Hers is a dreadful account of traumatising and harmful contact with social work services in England – in Nina’s case, the mental health discrimination she experienced intersected with racial bias and an absence of cultural humility, which was never questioned because why would it? The consequences have been devastating for Nina and her family.  

Aspects of Nina’s experience are not isolated. Here in Scotland, the recent report from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) - Racial Inequality in Scotland: state of the nation - volume 1 - paints a distressing picture for Black and minority ethnic people (BME) both in terms of disproportionately poor experiences and outcomes in mental healthcare:  

“Racist stereotyping and racialised perceptions of threat create risks for service users from adversely racialised groups. The disparities linked to this, such as disproportionate rates of involuntary detention, can exacerbate mental health stigma, as people from BME backgrounds are less likely to open up about their mental health problems if they might be met with unfair or disproportionate responses from mental health services. This can reduce opportunities for early intervention, meaning that by the time people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds first come into contact with mental health services, they often experience worse symptoms and may require more significant interventions.” 

These important lived experience accounts of harmful contact across many settings and services are a reminder of the historical roots of stigma and discrimination in mental health services and the legacy we’re left with today.   

What does all of this mean for our work at See Me? 

All the evidence tells us that we need to pay heed to how other forms of discrimination intersect with mental health discrimination, if Scotland is to make the progress needed to shift the dial on persistent inequalities faced by many people living with mental health problems and illness. 

But a national programme can’t do it alone.

Working to end mental health discrimination will take everyone – communities and lived experience advocacy, policymakers and practice leaders from across all sectors. Maybe that should be the conversation for Time to Talk Day. 

If you’ve got this far, thanks for reading. We’d love to hear your reflections on this blog – if you feel motivated, do please share and leave a comment on our social media post. 

For more on how to get involved in Time to Talk Day 2026.

This blog post was contributed by See Me programme manager Fiona Brown.