Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness: Different Agendas, Different Goals

This Open Forum describes two agendas for addressing stigma surrounding mental illness: the services agenda, which aims to increase care seeking by decreasing stigma, and the rights agenda, which aims in the spirit of other civil rights efforts to eradicate the discrimination felt by people with mental illness. The two agendas developed independently and tend to embrace different approaches to effecting change in the population. These differences and directions for future research are described.