Portrayals of mental illness, treatment, and relapse and their effects on the stigma of mental illness: Population-based, randomized survey experiment in rural Uganda

by Justin D. Rasmussen, Bernard Kakuhikire, Charles Baguma, Scholastic Ashaba, Christine E. Cooper-Vince, Jessica M. Perkins, David R. Bangsberg, Alexander C. Tsai BackgroundMental illness stigma is a fundamental barrier to improving mental health worldwide, but little is known about how to durably reduce it. Understanding of mental illness as a treatable medical condition may influence stigmatizing beliefs, but available evidence to inform this hypothesis has been derived solely from high-income countries. We embedded a randomized survey experiment within a whole-population cohort study in rural southwestern Uganda to assess the extent to which portrayals of mental illness treatment effectiveness influence personal beliefs and perceived norms about mental illness and about persons with mental illness. Methods and findingsStudy participants were randomly assigned to receive a vignette describing a typical woman (control condition) or one of nine variants describing a different symptom presentation (suggestive of schizophrenia, bipolar, or major depression) and treatment course (no treatment, treatment with remission, or treatment with remission followed by subsequent relapse). Participants then answered questions about personal beliefs and perceived norms in three domains of stigma: willingness to have the woman marry into their family, belief that she is receiving divine punishment, and belief that she brings shame on her family. We used multivariable Poisson and ordered log...
Source: PLoS Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Source Type: research