During my visit to Zimbabwe in March 2011 I met a young woman who’d been diagnosed with breast cancer several years earlier. Surgeons in Harare performed a mastectomy, and she lost her left breast. I asked her if she told others in her village about her illness.
No, she said. She didn’t want to tell anyone outside her family about her breast cancer. “I only wanted my family to know: my husband, his mother and father and family; on my side: my mother, father, my brothers and sisters. Besides that, I didn’t want to tell anybody since in our culture, most people will go around mocking you. They will say, ‘Look at that woman, she is no longer normal. She is surviving with only one breast. She no longer has another breast.’”
Her words brought to mind people with AIDS I’d met during earlier visits to southern Africa who were affected by stigma. Some had isolated themselves in shame from friends and family; some were shunned by the community; one woman refused to go to the clinic for a chronic cough fearing that if she had TB, friends and family would say she had AIDS and reject her.
To stigmatize someone is to scorn or reject them because they possess some undesired trait. Stigma arises from fear, denial, myths and prejudices, and from a lack of knowledge about a disease. Stigma leads to alienation, rejection, ostracism and isolation of people with the disease, and, often, of their caregivers, family and children.
Sadly, a Zimbabwean doctor notes that still today stigma adds to the suffering of many people with AIDS…and for people with cancer, as the young woman indicates. (more…)
