Orientation and mobility with the assistance of a white cane can provide visually impaired people with freedom, independence and confidence, which is a stepping stone to becoming fully independent in their day to day lives, which in turn would guarantee full social inclusion. However, integration into society is difficult for a visually impaired individual because of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors. Adjustment to intrapersonal factors is primarily focused on accepting the specific limitations of visual impairments and learning the skills that will supplant those limitations. To a visually impaired person however, both these factors create a difficult challenge in their integration into a sighted environment and as a result the individual will prefer to try to 'pass' as a sighted individual, pretending their impairment does not exist. The cane and the guide dog are the most common assistive tools for orientation and mobility, but alongside their function as assistive tools, they also have a symbolic function, denoting the person as a visually impaired individual. As such, they can be the source of labels, and consequently societal stigmas, which is considered to be one of the most destructive social phenomena, placing blind and visually impaired individuals on the margins of society. Blindness is one of the larger types of impairments that can be encountered, and despite the many recent technological advancements, it still represents a difficult problem to this day. The aim of this work is to provide a wide review of the literature that encompasses the topics of stigma, shame and fear in the use of the white cane and other assistive technologies for the visually impaired. The use of the white cane in orientation and mobility reflects a stigma from the social environment, while in parallel creating fear and shame within the visually impaired individual. In addition, inertia, resistance, reluctance and the fear of appearing in public with a white cane which symbolizes an individual's visual impairment, are all much more connected to the stigmatization of the social environment, and much less with a lack of motivation for orientation and mobility training. Yet these are only some of the factors that contribute to an individual falling behind on taking up a rehabilitation program for orientation and mobility. This work will present a review of the theory, research and related literature that deals with these issues.