When you are ill, what your illness means depends on where you live and the cultural connotations associated with whatever you have been diagnosed with. If you have lung cancer, people will assume that you are probably, or were probably a smoker, and that there should be minimal sympathy towards your illness. Obesity? You should have been watching your diet, and you should have taken control over your lifestyle. You have a stigmatized sexually transmitted infection, and you are afraid to meet potential new sexual partners, as you are afraid of the rejection you may face when you disclose your illness to them.
The social stigma that comes with many illnesses is quite interesting, because as Conrad and Barker mention, “from a constructionist standpoint, there is nothing inherent about a condition that makes it stigmatizing, rather it is the social response to the condition and some of its manifestations, or the type of individuals who suffer from it, that make a condition stigmatized” (Conrad & Barker, S69). This makes me think about diseases such as HIV/AIDS, which carry a heavy amount of social stigma with them. Though HIV/AIDS is not as deadly today as it used to be when it first was identified as a pandemic, it is still heavily stigmatized. The stigma comes from the way the disease is spread and the people identified with those modes of transmission: needle sharing (drug users), unprotected sex (homosexual men), mother-to-child (poor, diseased Africans). Admitting you have the disease is akin to admitting that you are taking part in what is/was considered a “deviant” act or lifestyle that goes against the values of the majority, disease free population.