| Mental illness is a kind of chronic and recurrent disease, such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and so on. Patients will suffer from the physical and mental pain, as well as the stigma of different degrees, the existence of which will seriously affect their treatment and rehabilitation. Due to the unpopular characteristics of individuality, physical and psychological, stigma is an impression that discrimination and rejection are its core conceptions. What’s worse, stigma may influence their self-identity, which runs through the whole life. Low self-identity will have negative influences on their study, work and life.The current studies on stigma of mental illness are mostly in the western countries. Chinese researches are few, most of which just concentrate on the summary and lack comparison between the perceived stigma and the real stigma, while they are different. Besides, as for the research of self-identity, most domestic researchers just devote themselves to homosexuality, aids and any other special groups and college students, adolescents, but there are nearly no researches on self-identity about mental illness patients during their curing and rehabilitating processes.By using the method of measurement survey, we want to know the differences about stigma and self-identity in mental illness patients and healthy group, as well as the basic features about the stigma and self-identity of mental illness patients. According to this, the research is guided by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of qualitative research. That is, to interpret the illness and own experiences, feelings, then to explore the relation of mental illness patients’stigma and self-identity, the influencing factors, dynamic processes of self-identity. All these will provide references for mental illness patients’ prevention, treatment and rehabilitation.Specifically, this study has selected healthy group around one college in Wuhan and mental illness patients from one mental health hospital, they were assessed withthe perceived devaluation-discrimination scale and self-identity scale. Then according to the quantitative research, qualitative research has selected 6 individuals with mental illness and each person has finished two semi-structured interviews. The research collected the information by recording the interviews and transcribed them into words. Then, the method of IPA was used to analyze the respondents’ information and sum up the important themes of the cases. At last, all the themes of the cases were set out and higher themes and connections were extracted.The results show that:Healthy groups’ stigma on mental illness is slightly higher than the perceived stigma of the patients, but is not significant (p>0.05). Healthy group got higher scores on self-identity (p<0.001); Stigma in subjects of different sexes, educational backgrounds, and courses of disease have no significant differences, except the types of mental illness (p<0.05). Stigma in schizophrenia patients is the highest, then depression and stigma in bipolar disorder patients is the lowest; besides, the stigma and self-identity of mental illness patients show a trend that descends first and then ascend along with the courses of disease. The scores on stigma of mental illness patients are negatively correlated with self-identity. Stigma has negative influence on self-identity, and can interpret 35.3% of the variation.Based on the method of IPA, the outcome about the self-identity of the mental illness patents were extracted to three main themes:the influencing factors of self-identity, the stigma’s position, and the processes of self-identity.The influencing factors of patients’ self-identity mainly come from two aspects:the internal factors and external factors. External factors include social factors and family factors. Social factors consist of social support, social comment and the distribution of resources. Family factors mainly consist of economic factors and family support. Different from the external factors, internal factors depend on the patients’ cognitive and behavioral mode, including the attribution styles and psychological changes. Psychological changes mainly include accepting physical features and the changes of sense of worth. What’s more, researcher finds that the external factors can affect internal factors in this study. That is to say, after the patients got mental illness, they would experience two aspects factors that influence their self-identity, and the patients may internalize the external factors. Thus the internal factors play a critical role during the process.Stigma is a common experience that mental illness patients possess. The positionof stigma in mental illness patients’ self-identity processes changes a lot during the sick time. Before getting ill, people wouldn’t pay attention to mental illness; they even follow others and reject others who got this disease. However, when they themselves become one member of mental illness patients, they would realize the experience of stigma and then the feeling of stigma is a core emotion in their mind. So stigma and self-identity will interact each other. To a large extent, stigma hinders patients’ self-identity.The processes of patients’ self-identity went through four stages. They were contradictory feelings, negative cognition, acceptation of the reality, positive adaptation. What needs our attention is that these stages are not linear; they fluctuate interactively according to the course, influencing factors and so on. Which stage would stay greatly affects patients’ treat and rehabilitation. Whether patients accept the disease or not would play a crucial role on self-identity. |
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