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effect on their sense of helplessness is reinforced. When people reach the point of believing that they have no control, they nolonger have the will or energy to cope with life and a depressive state result.The cognitive schemas influence the way people with mood disorders experience themselves and others. The content ofdepressed individuals appraisals of the situations and events that they uncounted did much to explain their mood andbehaviour and revealed a consistent negative bias in information processing. Beck et al (1979) initially developed a cognitivemodel of emotional disorders to explain the biases and distortions in information processing that he observed in depressedindividuals. Those who are depressed focus on negative messages in the environment and ignore positive experiences. Thenegative schemas contribute to a view of the self as incompetent, unworthy and unlikely. All present experiences are vied asnegative, and there is no hope for the future, (Zust, 2000).In the manic phase, people focus on positive message in the environment and ignore negative experiences. These positiveschemas contribute to a grandiose view of themselves. Thus everything that occurs is seen as positive, and the future holds nolimits. When people get caught up in this process a number of cognitive distortions may occur which makes every bodyprone to have mental illness, hence no need to stigmatise the victims of the mental illness as it can strike anyone anytime.The cognitive behaviourism theory explains how people interpret their daily lives, adapt and make changes and develop theinsights to make those changes. The type of attitudes people play towards the mentally ill people are the results of the learnedbehaviour in their early childhood, hence the stigmatisation of mentally ill people is deep rooted as people learnt it as part oftheir life. Piaget (1973) thought that children learn by changing stimuli that challenge their experiences and perceptions. Heidentified our sensory-motor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational stages as stages that a child canlearn or unlearn negative behaviours like stigmatisation.Beck’s cognitive theory focuses on how people view themselves and their world. He identified cognitive schemas as personalcontrolling believes that influence the way people process data about themselves and others. Cognitive distortions resultsfrom cognitive triad of inadequate view of self, a negative misinterpretation of present and negative view of future.Cognitive models help to assess clients’ learning capabilities. They also help to analyse cognitive distortions that aresymptoms of a number of mental disorders. Personality is the unique way people respond to the environment and includespatterns of behaviour, emotion and cognition that remain constant from one situation to another, (Fontaine, 2003).The Study and SettingThe aim of this study was to examine the different ways that indicate how the mentally-ill are stigmatised. The study alsoattempts to find out the factors responsible for such stigmatisation among the people of Ha Leqele, Lesotho. As part of theintent of the study the various support available for the mentally-ill are also investigated.The setting of the study was generally in Maseru Province but specifically, Ha-Leqele, a suburb area, Lesotho, SouthernAfrica. Haleqele is the village adjacent to the Makoanyane military base and is near the Mohlomi Mental Hospital wherethere are quite a lot of mentally ill people who are so defined, due to the peculiar nature of the area. Despite being near thehospital, the place is peri-urban which enabled the researchers to elicit the views of the people in both rural and urban areas inthe country. At Ha Leqele, the most community of men are soldiers and women are working at the public sectors. Least ofthe community is not working at formal settings but carry out the daily duties at the fields and gardens.In considering adherence to professional standard in the conduct of research, unethical treatment of the participants wasmeticulously avoided in the study. As the ethics of the research require that participation in a social research study bevoluntary, no participant was forced to respond to the questionnaire. This is because social research at times involvesimposition into people’s lives. It may also require people to reveal their personal information to strangers (Capuzzi andGross, 2005). Capuzzi and Gross continue to say “researchers must protect research participants from harm of any kind. Thisincludes voluntary participation, informed consent, ensuring confidentiality and paying attention to issues of diversity.” Theparticipants were well informed about the purpose of the research study. For example, the names of the participant wereinsignificant to the study to avoid any possible harm to the questionnaire while the findings reported were as summarized inthe results (ACA’s Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice booklet, 1995).177