ABSTRACT
Human suffering is ubiquitous. However, not all people suffer equally and some of the reasons for this unevenness can be traced to the particular social contexts of their lives. The biopsychosocial sources of suffering are complex and reflect the particular circumstances of individuals. Those sources are not equally distributed from conception to death. Moreover, if suffering is on a continuum, then those who suffer most may contend with not only their personal distress but also the social disadvantages, which then accrue. In modern times that point applies in particular to psychiatric patients. Those who are socially impaired by the degree of their anxiety or sadness, and those who are feared because of their lack of intelligibility, are burdened by emergent forms of social defeat, stigma and social rejection, which add to their primary alienation from those around them. Thus normal and abnormal suffering are connected on a continuum but they bring with them different degrees of threat to social acceptance.
