Stigma of mental health among students: Do psychology studies provide an advantage?

Markšaitytė, R.¹, Žardeckaitė-Matulaitienė, K.¹, Endriulaitienė, A.¹, Tillman, D. R.², Hof, D. D.^2
1Vytautas Magnus University
²University of Nebraska at Kearney

 

Submission type

Poster only

Scheduled

Poster Sessions 4 (10.30-11:00), 27-09-2016, 10:30 - 11:00

Keywords

Stigma of mental health, self-stigma of seeking help, stigmatizing emotions, causal attribution beliefs, psychology students

Summary

 

This study aimed to compare self-stigma of seeking help of psychology students with students from other than social studies and to evaluate its relation to cognitive and affective aspects of mental illness stigma. 657 students from first to six year of studies (432 psychology students; 135 males) participated in a cross-sectional survey. Students answered self-report questionnaire consisting of self-stigma of seeking help scale, 12 questions addressing causal attributions of mental illness, and 13 questions covering experience of fear, anger and sympathy toward mentally ill.

The results revealed that psychology students reported lower levels of self-stigma of seeking help compared to students from other than social studies; but there was no difference in stigmatizing emotions or beliefs about control, stability, and locus of causality of mental illness. Furthermore, self-stigma of seeking help of future psychologists didn’t change with study years, and master students of other professions reported the increased unwillingness for seeking professional help compared to younger students. Regression analysis revealed that field of studies remained the strongest predictor of self-stigma of help seeking together with lower social desirability and higher stigmatizing anger to mentally ill.

Acknowledgement: thanks to Rugilė Žickytė, Vita Arlickienė, Vita Bikulčiūtė, and Karolina Kilinskaitė for data collection.

 

Auteurs