The identification of empirically derived past-year psychiatric comorbidity profiles was motivated by our questions of whether perceived alcohol stigma might be more “severe” among individuals with more highly concentrated internalizing psychiatric comorbidity. Consistent with our second hypothesis, it was evident that the internalizing comorbidity profile had significantly higher levels of perceived alcohol stigma than the comorbidity-unaffected and externalizing comorbidity profiles. Differences in perceived alcohol stigma between the internalizing comorbidity profile and these other profiles had a small to medium “effect” size. This extends previous findings of a positive association between perceived stigma and measures of psychiatric distress in clinical samples (Luoma et al. 2010; Schomerus et al. 2011) showing that perceived alcohol stigma is specifically elevated among those with internalizing psychiatric comorbidity with validated assessments of psychiatric disorders in the general population. Interestingly, the externalizing comorbidity class had lower levels of perceived alcohol stigma than the internalizing class and the no comorbidity class. Perhaps this reflects that the most distinct characteristic of this class was having a high probability of antisocial personality disorder, a condition often characterized by behaviors that lack a regard for social norms and others’ feelings.
