Roughly one in four Americans will experience a mental health issue during his or her lifetime (National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). The consequences of mental disorders are profound: people with mental disorders experience higher rates of disability and mortality. People with depression and schizophrenia have a 40-60% greater chance of dying prematurely than the general population (WHO, 2017). One reason is that some physical problems are left unattended (e.g., cardiovascular disease; WHO, 2017), suggesting that people with mental disorders pull away from care. On the other hand, it could be that more people need treatment for mental health symptoms than health systems around the world are ready to provide (WHO, 2017): 35-50% of people in high-income countries who need treatment never receive it. A different possibility is that stigma and discrimination create barriers for people with mental disorders to access to treatment, jobs, housing, and relationships; this lack of access compromises their ability to attend to their physical health (Corrigan & Fong, 2014; WHO, 2017). Being stigmatized, by itself, depletes instrumental, social, and economic resources, resulting in many negative outcomes, including disparities in the quality and quantity of education (Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, & Link, 2013). Adapting previous definitions of stigma in communication research (e.g., Smith, 2007), mental health stigma is defined herein as profoundly negative stereotypes about people living with mental disorders. In stigma research, it is useful to employ the term public stigma to refer to the stereotypes that have diffused and normalized through a community (Rüsch, Angermeyer, & Corrigan, 2005; Smith, Zhu, & Quesnell, 2016) and internalized stigma to refer to how the person living with the mental disorder absorbs public stigma into his or her identity (Rüsch et al., 2005). A variety of personal and social discriminatory acts arise from mental health stigma, from interpersonal avoidance to human rights violations, including restrictions on rights to education, work, marriage, and reproduction (WHO, 2017). Anticipating and experiencing these acts affect how people function in society as a whole and in education settings specifically. This essay hopes to spark a discussion about the intersections of communication, stigma, mental health, and education.