Introduction: Stigmatization by health professionals towards people with special needs has a strong influence on the treatment of people with special needs. The attitude of healthcare workers and their way of communicating is crucial, although health professionals are often unaware, and do not pay enough attention to it. Purpose: The purpose of the literature review is to investigate how common is stigmatization by health professionals towards people with special needs respectively to people with mental health disorders. Methods: In diploma work we used a descriptive work method, with a review of foreign scientific and professional literature. The following keywords were included in the search: stigmatization, health professionals, people with special needs, nursing care, nurse, mental health disorders. Sources were searched in the bibliographic databases CINAHL with full text, MEDLINE and DiKUL. We only used articles with free available full text, younger than ten years, with one exception and in English language. Results: The results of the reviewed studies shows, that the stigmatization of health professionals does not differ significantly from the general population. According to researches, pharmacists more stigmatize than doctors and nurses. Those health professionals, who have more contact with people with special needs stigmatize less. The attitude of nurses toward people with special needs in generally positive, which contributes to better and more quality care and better health. Discussion and conclusion: Research shows that stigmatization is indeed very common, not only by general population, but also by health professionals. Stereotypes and negative attitudes have a significant negative impact of stigmatization, and make it worse. Health professionals stigmatize, because of a lack of knowledge and because of fear of people with special needs or people with mental health disorders, as they are consider as dangerous and unpredictable. Social distance from people with mental health disorders makes stigmatization even worse. Training and education of health professionals and social contact between health professionals and people with mental health disorders are therefore important. The more is person with special needs stigmatized, the worse is their self-image. Such a person does not reveal signs of illness and later does not seek medical help, despite mental and emotional distress. Internalized stigma is consider as one of the worst consequences that a person accepts as part of personality, values and self-image.
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