Causal beliefs of the public and social acceptance of persons with mental illness: A comparative analysis of schizophrenia, depression and alcohol dependence

Psychological Medicine

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 303-314

  Schomerus, G ^a,b   Matschinger, H ^c   Angermeyer, M C ^d,e  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GREIFSWALD   (Germany)

^b HELIOS Hanseklinikum Stralsund ^*  (Germany)

^c UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG   (Germany)

^d UNIVERSITY OF CAGLIARI   (Italy)

^e Center for Public Mental Health   (Austria)

Author keywords

Attribution theory; Genetic essentialism; Population survey; Public attitudes; Stigma

Indexed keywords

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ALCOHOLISM; ARTICLE; ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; COMPARATIVE STUDY; CONTROLLED CLINICAL TRIAL; CONTROLLED STUDY; DEPRESSION; FEMALE; GENETIC PREDISPOSITION; GERMANY; HUMAN; LIFE EVENT; MALE; MENTAL STRESS; MIDDLE AGED; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL; SCHIZOPHRENIA; SOCIAL DISTANCE; YOUNG ADULT;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ALCOHOLISM; DEPRESSION; FEMALE; GENETIC PREDISPOSITION TO DISEASE; GERMANY; HEALTH KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES, PRACTICE; HUMANS; LIFE CHANGE EVENTS; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; SCHIZOPHRENIA; SOCIAL DISTANCE; STRESS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 84890030917     PISSN: 00332917     EISSN: 14698978     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S003329171300072X     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Alwin DF, Hauser RM (1975). The decomposition of effects in path analysis. American Sociological Review 40, 37-47.
2. Angermeyer MC, Holzinger A, Carta MG, Schomerus G (2011). Biogenetic explanations and public acceptance of mental illness: systematic review of population studies. British Journal of Psychiatry 199, 367-372.
3. Angermeyer MC, Matschinger H (1997). Social distance towards the mentally ill: results of representative surveys in the Federal Republic of Germany. Psychological Medicine 27, 131-141.
4. Angermeyer MC, Matschinger H (2005). Causal beliefs and attitudes to people with schizophrenia: trend analysis based on data from two population surveys in Germany. British Journal of Psychiatry 186, 331-334.
5. Aroian LA (1947). The probability function of the product of two normally distributed variables. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 18, 265-271.
6. Aroian LA, Taneja VS, Cornwell LW (1978). Mathematical forms of the distribution of the product of two normal variables. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 7, 165-172.
7. Bag B, Yilmaz S, Kirpinar I (2006). Factors influencing social distance from people with schizophrenia. International Journal of Clinical Practice 60, 289-294.
8. Bastian B, Haslam N (2006). Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42, 228-235.
9. Bennett L, Thirlaway K, Murray AJ (2008). The stigmatising implications of presenting schizophrenia as a genetic disease. Journal of Genetic Counseling 17, 550-559.
10. Boysen GA (2011). Biological explanations and stigmatizing attitudes: using essentialism and perceived dangerousness to predict antistigma intervention effectiveness. Journal of Social Psychology 151, 274-291.
11. Conrad P (2001). Genetic optimism: framing genes and mental illness in the news. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 25, 225-247.
12. Corrigan PW (2000). Mental health stigma as social attribution: implications for research methods and attitude change. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 7, 48-67.
13. Corrigan PW, Watson AC (2004). At issue: stop the stigma: call mental illness a brain disease. Schizophrenia Bulletin 30, 477-479.
14. Crisp AH, Gelder MG, Goddard E, Meltzer HI (2005). Stigmatization of people with mental illnesses: a follow-up study within the Changing Minds campaign of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. World Psychiatry 4, 106-113.
15. Dar-Nimrod I, Heine SJ (2011). Genetic essentialism: on the deceptive determinism of DNA. Psychological Bulletin 137, 800-818.
16. Dietrich S, Beck M, Bujantugs B, Kenzine D, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2004). The relationship between public causal beliefs and social distance toward mentally ill people. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 38, 348-354.
17. Dietrich S, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2006). The relationship between biogenetic causal explanations and social distance toward people with mental disorders: results from a population survey in Germany. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 52, 166-174.
18. Fusar-Poli P, Broome M, Cortesi M (2007). Can neuroimaging reduce social stigma in schizophrenia? Medical Hypotheses 69, 457.
19. Grausgruber A, SchönyW, Grausgruber-Berner R, Koren G, Apor BF, Wancata J, Meise U (2009). "Schizophrenie hat viele Gesichter" - Evaluierung der österreichischen Anti-Stigma-Kampagne 2000-2002 ("Schizophrenia has many faces" - evaluation of the Austrian Anti-Stigma Campaign 2000-2002). Psychiatrische Praxis 36, 327-333.
20. Hansell J, Bailin AP, Franke KA, Kraft JM, Wu HY, Dolsen MR, Harley VS, Kazi NF (2011). Conceptually sound thinking about depression: an Internet survey and its implications. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 42, 382-390.
21. Haslam N, Rothschild L, Ernst D (2000). Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology 39, 113-127.
22. Insel TR (2009). Disruptive insights in psychiatry: transforming a clinical discipline. Journal of Clinical Investigation 119, 700-705.
23. Jorm AF, Griffiths KM (2008). The public's stigmatizing attitudes towards people with mental disorders: how important are biomedical conceptualizations? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 118, 315-321.
24. Kurtz E (2002). Alcoholics Anonymous and the disease concept of alcoholism. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 20, 5-39.
25. Lam D, Salkovskis P, Warwick H (2005). An experimental investigation of the impact of biological versus psychological explanations of the cause of "mental illness". Journal of Mental Health 14, 453-464.
26. Lewison G, Roe P, Wentworth A, Szmukler G (2012). The reporting of mental disorders research in British media. Psychological Medicine 42, 435-441.
27. Link BG, Cullen FT, Frank J, Wozniak JF (1987). The social rejection of former mental patients: understanding why labels matter. American Journal of Sociology 92, 1461-1500.
28. Link BG, Phelan JC, Bresnahan M, Stueve A, Pescosolido BA (1999). Public conceptions of mental illness: labels, causes, dangerousness, and social distance. American Journal of Public Health 89, 1328-1333.
29. MacKinnon DP, Fairchild AJ (2009). Current directions in mediation analysis. Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, 16-20.
30. MacKinnon DP, Fairchild AJ, Fritz MS (2007). Mediation analysis. Annual Review of Psychology 58, 593.
31. MacKinnon DP, Warsi G, Dwyer JH (1995). A simulation study of mediated effect measures. Multivariate Behavioral Research 30, 41-62.
32. Martin JK, Pescosolido BA, Olafsdottir S, McLeod JD (2007). The construction of fear: Americans' preferences for social distance from children and adolescents with mental health problems. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 48, 50-67.
33. Martin JK, Pescosolido BA, Tuch SA (2000). Of fear and loathing: the role of 'disturbing behavior,' labels, and causal attributions in shaping public attitudes toward people with mental illness. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 41, 208-223.
34. National Alliance for Mental Illness (2008). Understanding schizophrenia and recovery: what you need to know about this medical illness (http://www.nami.org/Template. cfm?Section=By-Illness&template=/ ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID6=7729). Accessed 23 July 2010.
35. National Alliance for Mental Iillness (2009). Major depression fact sheet (http://www.nami.org/Template. cfm?Section=Depression&Template=/ ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID8=8956). Accessed 15 July 2010.
36. Nelkin D, Lindee MS (1995). The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. Freeman: New York.
37. Pattyn E, Verhaeghe M, Bracke P (2012). Attitudes toward community mental health care: the contact paradox revisited. Community Mental Health Journal. Published online 20 November 2012. doi:10.1007/s10597-012-9564-4.
38. Pescosolido BA, Martin JK, Long JS, Medina TR, Phelan JC, Link BG (2010). "A disease like any other"? A decade of change in public reactions to schizophrenia, depression, and alcohol dependence. American Journal of Psychiatry 167, 1321-1330.
39. Phelan JC (2005). Geneticization of deviant behavior and consequences for stigma: the case of mental illness. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46, 307-322.
40. Phelan JC, Yang LH, Cruz-Rojas R (2006). Effects of attributing serious mental illnesses to genetic causes on orientations to treatment. Psychiatric Services 57, 382-387.
41. Preacher KJ, Hayes AF (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods 40, 879-891.
42. Raykov T, Mels G (2007). Lower level mediation effect analysis in two-level studies: a note on a multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Structural Equation Modeling 14, 636-648.
43. Schnittker J (2008). An uncertain revolution: why the rise of a genetic model of mental illness has not increased tolerance. Social Science and Medicine 67, 1370-1381.
44. Schomerus G (2012). Stigmatisierung der Opfer von Kindesmisshandlungen - Traumafolgen im sozialen Kontext (Stigmatization of child abuse victims - the consequences of trauma in a social context). In Kindesmisshandlung. Psychische und körperliche Folgen im Erwachsenenalter (Child Abuse: Mental and Physical Consequences in Adulthood) (ed. C. Spitzer and H. J. Grabe), pp. 413-419. Kohlhammer: Stuttgart.
45. Schomerus G, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2006a). Alcoholism: illness beliefs and resource allocation preferences of the public. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 82, 204-210.
46. Schomerus G, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2006b). Preferences of the public regarding cutbacks in expenditure for patient care: are there indications of discrimination against those with mental disorders? Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 41, 369-377.
47. Schomerus G, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2008). Traces of Freud - the unconscious conflict as a cause of mental disorders in the eyes of the general public. Psychopathology 41, 173-178.
48. Schomerus G, Matschinger H, Angermeyer MC (2013). Continuum beliefs and stigmatizing attitudes towards persons with schizophrenia, depression and alcohol dependence. Psychiatry Research. Published online 2 March 2013. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2013.02.006.
49. Schomerus G, Schwahn C, Holzinger A, Corrigan PW, Grabe HJ, Carta MG, Angermeyer MC (2012). Evolution of public attitudes about mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 125, 440-452.
50. Sellman D (2010). The 10 most important things known about addiction. Addiction 105, 6-13.
51. Sobel ME (1982). Asymptotic confidence intervals for indirect effects in structural equation models. Sociological Methodology 13, 290-312.
52. Sobel ME (1986). Some new results on indirect effects and their standard errors in covariance structure models. Sociological Methodology 16, 159-186.
53. van 't Veer JT, Kraan HF, Drosseart SH, Modde JM (2006). Determinants that shape public attitudes towards the mentally ill: a Dutch public study. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 41, 310-317.
54. Walker I, Read J (2002). The differential effectiveness of psychosocial and biogenetic causal explanations in reducing negative attitudes toward "mental illness". Psychiatry 65, 313-325.
55. Weiner B (1995). Judgments of Responsibility : A Foundation for a Theory of Social Conduct. Guilford Press: New York.
56. WonPat-Borja AJ, Yang LH, Link BG, Phelan JC (2012). Eugenics, genetics, and mental illness stigma in Chinese Americans. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 47, 145-156.
57. Wu A, Zumbo B (2008). Understanding and using mediators and moderators. Social Indicators Research 87, 367-392.
58. Zubin J, Spring B (1977). Vulnerability: a new view of schizophrenia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 86, 103-126.