Intervention Research And Suggestions To University Students' Mental Illness Public Stigma

Mental illness stigma refers to social public members' negative attitudes towards people with mental illness,including the negative cognition,negative emotion and negative behavior tendency.With mental illness stigma,patients with mental illness are labeled as "abnormal" and "crazy",which have serious negative impact on them.Due to the negative impact of mental illness public stigma,the intervention has been increasingly emphasized.Protested,education and contact are promoted as interventions.Education in mental illness reduction means replacement error information with correct information,which mainly used to intervene explicit mental illness public stigma,but the intervention effect is still controversial.At the same time,there is still a large space to explore the effect of education in intervening implicit mental illness public stigma.In addition,contact in mental illness reduction emphasizes the interaction between the public and the stigmatized group.Out of convenient and controllable considerations,contact is often conducted in indirect way in the practical application.Furthermore,imagery contact as an indirect contact way,has been applied to stigma invention in many researches,but still hasn't been applied to intervene mental illness public stigma.How about the effect of education,imagery contact and the combination of these two methods(called “education+imagery contact” for short)on mental illness public stigma? And what are the effect differences between explicit stigma and implicit stigma? This research is going to explore all of these problems.Accordingly,94 college students are divided into 4 groups,which are education group,imagery contact group,education+imagery contact group,and control group respectively.Then different intervening activities or unrelated activities are conducted.Explicit mental illness public stigma are measured by AQ-27(attribution questionnaire-27)and implicit mental illness public stigma are measured by GNAT(GO/NO GO association test)before and after activities.The effect of each intervention is evaluated by the difference between pre-test and post-test,and theeffect of different interventions is evaluated by the difference between post-test results.The results show that:1.As for explicit mental illness public stigma,education,imagery contact,and education+imagery contact all have effects in some dimensions:(1)Education intervention is effective in responsibility,risk assessment,anger,fear,coercion,segregation and avoidance dimensions.(2)Imagery contact intervention is effective in risk assessment,fear and avoidance dimensions.(3)Education+imagery contact is effective in responsibility,risk assessment,pity,fear,help,coercion,segregation and avoidance dimensions.(4)As for responsibility,coercion and segregation dimensions,there is no significant different intervening effects between education and education+imagery contact.(5)As for risk assessment dimension,the effect of imagery contact is weakest.As for the fear dimension,education has better effect than imagery contact.As for avoidance dimension,there is no significant difference of three interventions.2.As for the implicit mental illness public stigma,all of education,imagination and education+imagery contact are effective on the whole.Specifically on each dimensions,results show that:(1)Education is significantly effective in emotional dimension.(2)Imagery contact is significantly effective in cognitive dimension and behaviors tendency dimensions.(3)Education+imagery contact is significantly effective in emotional dimension,which is similar to education.(4)Education,imagery contact and education+imagery contact all have significant effects on the whole implicit mental illness public stigma.3.University students have obvious negative tendency in implicit mental illness public stigma,which is more serious than explicit mental illness stigma.Education has better effect on explicit mental illness public stigma intervention.Imagery contacthas better effect on implicit mental illness public stigma.Education+imagery contact has similar effect with education.Based on the above results,this paper analyzes the causes and puts forward some relevant countermeasures and suggestions to reduce the mental illness public stigma,which mainly include:(1)to strengthen education and guidance;(2)promote effective patient contact;(3)make the combination of education and contact more effective;(4)make the social expectations more reasonable...