Having Mental Illness Does Not Make People More Accepting, Research Shows

Main Category: Mental Health
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 10 Nov 2009 - 0:00 PST

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Having a mental illness does not make people more accepting of others with a similar problem, research says.

Amy Klassen asked 1073 people in Alberta, Canada, about their attitudes generally toward people who had a mental illness.

She found that those among the 1073 who had themselves been treated for a mental illness were no more accepting of others who have a mental illness.

However Ms Klassen, who worked with the Population Research Laboratory and the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta, Canada, found that those questioned were less willing to reject those with a mental illness if they knew someone who had had such a problem.

Those surveyed were given eight statements, including 'being around a mentally ill person would make me feel nervous' and 'even though former mental patients may seem fine, it is foolish to forget that they are mentally ill' and asked to say how much they agreed or disagreed. From this their desire for 'social distance' from those with mental illness - how rejecting or not they were - was calculated.

Ms Klassen, currently of the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, found that there was no difference in the level of social acceptance of mental illness between participants who had been treated for mental illness - about 15 per cent of the sample - and those who had not.

But if the participants knew someone who had been treated for a mental illness, they were less rejecting of those with mental illness than were those who did not know someone who had been treated.

"Perhaps the reason why personally receiving mental health treatment is not predictive of lower social distance is because people who get mental health treatment may not see themselves as mentally ill," Ms Klassen writes in her paper, 'Do Contact and Responsibility Both Predict Social Distance? An analysis of Albertans' preferences for social distance from people with mental illness and problems.'

"Knowing someone who has a mental illness may sensitize the individual to the struggles associated with mental illness; therefore, the overall effect of this knowledge can work to reduce the desire for social distance in a way that may be unattainable by personally receiving treatment."

Ms Klassen, who is now researching a PhD, also found that those who tended to believe that people with mental illness were personally responsible for their conditions also preferred a greater social distance than those who thought they were less responsible it.

She also found that more casual contact with people who had a mental illness - noticing someone on the street who appeared to have a mental illness, for instance - did not increase social acceptance.

She believes this has an implication for official programmes to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. "First, the fact that contact had little impact on the variation in the desire for social distance suggests is that anti-stigma programs and policies that focus solely on increasing the amount of interaction that the general public has with the mentally ill may not effectively be targeting the mechanism that can improve the public's willingness to interact with the mentally ill.

"Simply increasing the amount of contact between the general public and mentally ill may have little effect on reducing the desire for social distance.

"Second, my study does suggest that one way anti-stigma programs and policies can have a more effective impact on the desire for social distance is by changing how the public attributes responsibility for mental health conditions. My findings clearly show that the attribution of personal responsibility is associated with higher levels of social distance.

"Anti-stigma programs and policies may want to consider focusing their attention on the reduction of individual causal attributions, such as the attribution of personal responsibility, as part of their ongoing efforts to socialize the general public about the reality of living with a mental health condition."

She will submit her findings, which she believes are applicable in countries outside Canada, to academic journals shortly.

Notes

1. The statements were put to people on the Alberta Survey, a random-sample telephone survey of adults in Alberta.

2. The statement put the interviewees were:

- a person with mental illness would have little or no hope of being accepted within his/her community;

- most people would be willing to hire a former mental patient as an employee (reverse coded);

- being around a mentally ill person would make me feel nervous;

- even though former mental patients may seem fine it is foolish to forget that they are mentally ill;

- most people would be willing to be friends with a family members of a mental patient (reverse coded);

- most people would be willing to marry a person who came from a family with a history of mental illness (reverse coded);

- most people believe that children of mental patients are destined to become mentally ill in the future;

- family members of a person with mental illness would be better off if the mental illness was kept secret

The interviewees could give a range of responses, varying from strongly disagree to strongly agree, to each question.

3. The results were subjected to statistical analysis using the ordinary least square regression method which does not give a percentage value for how much higher or lower the social distance measure is between those who know someone who has been treated for a mental illness, as opposed to those who do not.

Source
British Sociological Association