Why is that the case?

Even in the developed world, people with psychiatric disorders are still occasionally called psychos while people with type 2 diabetes don't get called "pancreatos".

Even in successful cases of stigma reduction like epilepsy, stigma did not disappear fully and the reduction that did happen was mostly normalization through prolonged contact and normal generational replacement. Intellectual arguments like "it's just a disorder, like hypertension" barely changed anyone's mind.

43 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Why is that the case?

Even in the developed world, people with psychiatric disorders are still occasionally called psychos while people with type 2 diabetes don't get called "pancreatos".

Even in successful cases of stigma reduction like epilepsy, stigma did not disappear fully and the reduction that did happen was mostly normalization through prolonged contact and normal generational replacement. Intellectual arguments like "it's just a disorder, like hypertension" barely changed anyone's mind.

I think people are often fearful of those with mental illness because some varieties of it can make their responses to communication unpredictable and hard to react to in a constructive way. The term "psycho" refers to a psychotic individual, that is, one who has lost contact with reality and reason to a significant degree, perhaps with delusions or hallucinations and so forth. This is quite upsetting to encounter and deal with. How are you supposed to respond if a person tells you there are voices in his head, telling him men in black are out to get him? Whereas with a physically ill person one can at least carry on a normal conversation, because they retain their reason.

There are plenty of mental afflictions that don't lead to psychotic behaviour of course, but I suspect one reason for the stigma is that people who don't know details of a person's condition may fear this is what they may encounter.