Discrimination Against the Mentally Ill

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) makes it illegal to discriminate against people with mental or physical impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act was intended to bring more physically and emotionally challenged people into the labor force, but there are other provisions of the act which are intended to assure that the disabled have en environment in which they can function and that the services of government in particular are provided to the disabled as to other Americans.

One of the primary objectives of the act is to improve the employment situation for persons with disabilities by eliminating employer discrimination, and an implicit assumption is that problems faced by disabled workers derive from employer prejudice and discrimination. Critics note that there are costs to employers in accommodating the disabled in the workplace in some cases, and the act does not address this issue but instead leaves it up to the employer to incur such costs. The

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en to achieve this goal: M The National Stigma Clearinghouse, a network of advocates for the mentally ill, successfully campaigned against giving comic strip hero Superman's killer a psychiatric illness. M The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill oversees a network of 500 "stigma busters" who wrote in to protest talk show host Geraldo Rivera's comment comparing certain mentally ill people to "werewolves." M The Carter Center of Emory University's Mental Illnesses and Entertainment Media Initiative asks television and film producers to avoid stereotypes of the mentally ill. Media presentations are only part of the problem, however. Stigma is defined as a mark of infamy or disgrace, and when used by the mental health industry, the term "invariably means an unfair, inaccurate, and dysfunctional reputation tied to a notion of mental illness that lacks any voluntary component" (Vatz). This view is associated with the medical model, which states that all mental illness is analogous to physical illness that happens to people, eliminating any element of choice, control, or discretion. To much of the public, however, mental illness seems a sign of deviance. The concept of deviance involves a degree of stigmatization of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1473
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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