What do we see when we look in the mirror? One in 111 people see a socially or psychologically “significant” facial disfigurement, according to nonprofit leader James Partridge.
In a talk at Stanford titled “Face Different, Life Ruined?” on Monday night, Changing Faces founder and chief executive Partridge talked about his work fighting the stigma attached to disfigurement, which he said includes the visual effects of a rash, scar or skin graft on a person’s skin or an asymmetry or paralysis to their face or body.
Changing Faces, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit, counsels those with a disfigurement, challenges public attitudes and works to ensure a culture of inclusion through social change.
At age 18, Partridge was severely burned in a car accident.
“The first time I really knew I’d done something to myself was when an old friend of mine came in and fainted in the ward,” Partridge said. “I started to realize that people weren’t actually looking at me. They were looking away.”
Although Partridge had some reconstructive surgery, he said he was enriched by his disfigurement. Rather than continue with more reconstructive surgery, he “liberated” himself from the “absurd pressures” put on him to conceal his disfigurement.
“I had felt so much like Humpty Dumpty,” Partridge said. “Surgeons can get you back on the wall. Although the problem for me was I didn’t want to spend my life on the wall. I met people sitting on the wall thinking, ‘This is hell.’ They felt pushed into the margins of society.”
Pop culture does little to dispel this culture of exclusion, but rather enforces strong stereotypes and prejudices regarding disfigurement, he said: “Culture has used–and I mean used–disfigurement as a device.”
In the majority of James Bond movies, for example, the main villains are scarred. Other infamous disfigured cinema characters include the Phantom of the Opera, the beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” and Scar in “The Lion King,” Partridge pointed out.
Popular television shows are not innocent either. “Nip/Tuck,” an American drama about plastic surgery, once featured an advertising slogan, “Ugliness demeans us all. Invest in your face.”
In an effort to understand cultural attitudes concerning disfigurement, Changing Faces conducted an “implicit attitude test.” It found that 90 percent of those surveyed implicitly judge people with disfigurements to be less attractive, less likely to succeed and less likely to lead happy lives. People with disfigurements often deeply hold these unconscious negative attitudes themselves.
While patients need multidisciplinary treatment, society needs to challenge the prejudices often responsible for those patients’ vulnerability to low self-esteem, depression and reduced self-confidence, Partridge argued. At the group level, governments, public policy and education need to dispel the myths regarding disfigurement.
“I was surprised by all the sectors working for the same goal: the medical field, schools, et cetera,” said Abdulkareem Agunbiade ’10, organizer of the talk. “And I figured a lot of Stanford students would be interested in learning about disfigurement. It’s an important issue.”