The consequences of speaking out against mental health stigma

Abstract

Stigmatization of people living with mental illnesses is widespread, yet researchers have been slow to empirically test the efficacy of strategies intending to combat these stigmas. For example, confronting—or pointing out and expressing displeasure with someone else’s prejudiced actions—is regularly touted as an effective prejudice reduction strategy (e.g., Czopp et al., 2006), but, until now, researchers have not tested whether confronting mental health stigma discourages prejudice expression amongst perpetrators. Across two studies, we explored prejudice expression norms toward people living with mental illness as well as people’s reactions to being confronted for expressing prejudice toward the mentally ill. In Study 1 (N = 547, 66% female, 76.1% White), we examined college students’ beliefs about how normative it is to express prejudice toward people living with depression. We found that college students, on average, think prejudice expression against depressed people is non-normative on campus (1-item, 3-point scale: M = 1.30, SD = 0.52) and report little personal endorsement of blatant prejudice toward this group (1-item, 3-point scale: M = 1.10, SD = 0.32). In Study 2 (N = 50, 59.3% female, 74.1% White), we explored the college students’ imagined reactions to being confronted about expressing prejudice toward people living with depression. Participants read a vignette that required them to imagine telling a joke that implied something negative about depressed people. Then they imagined an acquaintance confronting them for being prejudiced. Analyses revealed that, on average, college students reported that telling biased jokes about depressed people is offensive (2-items, 9-point scale, α = .90: M = 7.52, SD = 1.45), that they would feel highly guilty for expressing this type of bias (3-items, 7-point scale, α = .91; M = 5.40, SD = 1.62), and that they would want to apologize (3-items, 7-point scale, α = .74; M = 5.43, SD = 0.93). Taken together, these results provide preliminary evidence that confronting mental health stigma may effectively discourage prejudice expression. However, given the sheer amount of research revealing wide gaps between how forecasters think they would respond in a given situation and how experiencers actually respond (e.g., Kawakami et al., 2009), additional work is needed to examine whether actually confronting people about mental health stigma reduces prejudice expression.