Familiarity with and social distance from people who have serious mental illness.

OBJECTIVES: This study examined the effects of familiarity with and social distance from persons who have serious mental illness on stigmatizing attitudes about mental illness. METHODS: A total of 208 community college students completed three written measures about familiarity, perception of dangerousness, fear, and social distance. Path analysis with manifest-variable structural modeling techniques was used to test a version of a model in which familiarity influences the perception of dangerousness, which in turn influences fear, which influences social distance from persons with serious mental illness. RESULTS: Most of the participants reported experience with mental illness. Scores on the three written measures largely supported the path model. Correlations between the perception of dangerousness and fear as well as between fear and social distance were particularly strong. CONCLUSIONS: Approaches to social change that increase the public's familiarity with serious mental illness will decrease stigma. Further studies are warranted that focus on how contact between members of the general public and persons who have serious mental illness may be facilitated.

Three strategies for changing attributions about severe mental illness.

The effects of three strategies for changing stigmatizing attitudes--education (which replaces myths about mental illness with accurate conceptions), contact (which challenges public attitudes about mental illness through direct interactions with persons who have these disorders), and protest (which seeks to suppress stigmatizing attitudes about mental illness)--were examined on attributions about schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses. One hundred and fifty-two students at a community college were randomly assigned to one of the three strategies or a control condition. They completed a questionnaire about attributions toward six groups--depression, psychosis, cocaine addiction, mental retardation, cancer, and AIDS--prior to and after completing the assigned condition. As expected, results showed that education had no effect on attributions about physical disabilities but led to improved attributions in all four psychiatric groups. Contact produced positive changes that exceeded education effects in attributions about targeted psychiatric disabilities: depression and psychosis. Protest yielded no significant changes in attributions about any group. This study also examined the effects of these strategies on processing information about mental illness.

Changing attitudes about schizophrenia.

Research on the effectiveness of short-term education programs in changing societal attitudes about mental illness has been mixed. Education efforts seem to be mediated by characteristics of the program participants. This study determines whether the effects of a specially prepared, semester-long course on severe mental illness are mediated by pre-education knowledge about and contact with severe mental illness. Eighty-three participants who were enrolled in either a course on severe mental illness or general psychology completed the Opinions about Mental Illness Questionnaire before beginning the course and at completion. Research participants also completed a pre-and posttest of knowledge about mental illness and a pretest on their contact with people who have severe mental illness. The education program had positive effects on some attitudes about mental illness. Interestingly, the effects of education group interacted with pre-education knowledge and contact and varied depending on attitude. Participants with more pre-education knowledge and contact were less likely to endorse benevolence attitudes after completing the education program. Participants with more intimate contact showed less improvement in attitudes about social restrictiveness. Implications of these augmentation and ceiling effects are discussed.