broken personality: lived experiences of patients with psychiatric disorders on self-stigma

introduction: psychiatric disorders are among the most stigmatizing disorders. self-stigma will have desperate consequences for people such as patients who consider themselves worthless since they belong to a group that most people have negative feelings about. the present study was designed and conducted to better understand the experiences of patients with psychiatric disorders on self-stigma. methods: this study, performed on 12 psychiatric patients in 2017, was a hermeneutic phenomenological research. the patients were selected based on purposive sampling method and unstructured interviews were used for data collection. according to the method developed by diekelmann, a hermeneutic approach was used to analyze the data. moreover, to determine the validity of the study, the criteria provided by guba and lincoln were utilized. results: broken personality was identified as the main theme of the phenomenon and included seven subthemes: injured feelings , like wax in the hands of others , scandalous symptoms of disease , coming from another land , stranger to oneself , degradation of the position , and shame of diagnosis . conclusion: the results of this study emphasized the necessity to develop comprehensive and appropriate interventions to combat and prevent self-stigma in patients with psychiatric disorders.