الفهرس 
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Abstract
Mental illness is associated with an immense stigma. Such stigma causes people affected to hide their illness or even themselves from the community; and as a result being deprived out of many life opportunities such as receiving treatment, losing social network of supportive persons such as friends, being denied suitable work opportunities, housing and education. The impact of stigma and strategies used to cope with help complicate the problem that extend further beyond just being affected with an illness but more suffering a mental illness label. This strongly exacerbates the condition with main focus on psychiatric symptoms and self esteem. This may explain why stigma of mental illness received increased attention in recent years.
The present study aimed to identify presence of stigma among patients with mental illness and to determine the coping strategies they used with it. The study was conducted at the psychiatric outpatient clinics of El-Maamoura Hospital for Psychiatric Medicine, Raas El Tein General Hospital, and Gamal Abd El Nasser Health Insurance Hospital in Alexandria.
The study covered 400 psychiatric patients of both sexes, aged between 20 and 60 years, medically diagnosed as mentally ill, able to communicate and who agreed to participate in the study.
Data of this study were obtained using the following tools:
Tool I: Patient’s socio-demographic and clinical data interview schedule:
It was constructed by the researcher to elicit data about patient’s age, sex, marital status, educational level, employment, living situation, area of residence, diagnosis, history of illness, number of pervious admissions and date of the last discharge if any.
Tool II: The Consumer Experiences of Stigma Questionnaire (CESQ):
This tool was developed by Wahl (1999) and modified by Wong and Chung (2004); and has been translated into Arabic language by the researcher. It is composed of three parts.