University Students' Attitudes Towards Mental Patients and Psychiatric Treatment

Ka‐Fai Chung · Eric Yu Hai Chen · Catherine S.M. Liu

114 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Social Psychiatry

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Mental Health Treatment and Access Psychology and Mental Health Inclusion and Disability in Education and Sport

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Public attitudes towards mental patients and psychiatric treatment are mostly unfavorable. Mental patients tend to conceal their illness or selectively disclose their treatment histories to someone they trust. AIMS: To examine the university students' attitudes towards different information regarding a person labeled as mentally ill. METHODS: We designed seven descriptions of a mentally ill person of varying past and current treatment histories and randomly assigned 308 university undergraduates to read one of the descriptions. Subjects rated their willingness to interact with the hypothetical case using a 19-item social distance scale. RESULTS: Greater social distance was associated with non-medical field of study, no previous contact with the mentally ill and female gender. Subjects without previous contact with mentally ill individuals kept greater distance from a discharged mental patient receiving psychiatric care than a mental patient who did not require medications nor psychiatric follow-up. In contrast, respondents who had previous contact with the mentally ill were more willing to interact with a discharged mental patient receiving psychiatric care comparing with a person labeled as mentally ill alone and a mental patient who had never been admitted to hospital. CONCLUSIONS: Implications of our findings in clinical management and designing stigma-reducing programme are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 114 citations exist upstream.

References

1989A Modified Labeling Theory Approach to Mental Disorders: An Empirical Assessment 1987Understanding Labeling Effects in the Area of Mental Disorders: An Assessment of the Effects of Expectations of Rejection 1987The Social Rejection of Former Mental Patients: Understanding Why Labels Matter 1999Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma.1998The impact of stigma on severe mental illness 1991The Effectiveness of Stigma Coping Orientations: Can Negative Consequences of Mental Illness Labeling be Avoided?1994Dispelling the Stigma of Schizophrenia: What Sort of Information Is Best?1997Stigma and mental illness: A review and critique

Cited by

2018The stigmatization of nonsuicidal self‐injury 2005Social distance towards people with mental illness amongst Nigerian university students 2007The use of puppets with elementary school children in reducing stigmatizing attitudes towards mental illness 2004Factors contributing to frequent use of psychiatric inpatient services by schizophrenia patients 2011Mental Health Stigma about Serious Mental Illness among MSW Students: Social Contact and Attitude

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.