Rethinking ‘Mental Health Stigma’

The stigma of mental illness is devastating for both sufferers and their families, and can affect every area of life including interpersonal relationships, access to employment and other desired social roles and quality of health care.¹ It is certainly a problem in contemporary Britain where half the population believes that people with eating disorders feel different from ‘normal’ people, more than 60% of the population believes that people with severe depression are hard to talk to and more than 70% of the population believes that people with schizophrenia are a danger to others.²

London and Evans-Lacko³ evaluate Time to Change 3—a large-scale intervention, based on contact theory, aimed at reducing prejudice against persons with mental illnesses in Britain. From an intervention standpoint, the three strategies mentioned—Get Moving!, Living Libraries and Education Not Discrimination (END)—are likely quite sound. Contact is one of the most robust and reliable means of reducing intergroup prejudice. It has been shown to work with a variety of outgroups and under varied circumstances, despite many of them being less than ideal.⁴

Furthermore, contrary to London and Evans-Lako’s assertion that, ‘social contact research in the past has mostly been conducted in experimental rather than naturalistic settings’, a recent meta-analysis of all available contact research⁴ showed that the majority of contact research conducted thus far involved participants reporting (albeit retrospectively) on …