Evidence suggests that Arabic-speaking refugees in Australia seek help from informal sources, including religious and community leaders, when experiencing mental health issues. Despite their significant influence, there is scarce research exploring attitudes of Arabic-speaking leaders toward mental illness. The current exploratory study explored mental illness stigma and various factors among Arabic-speaking religious and community leaders. This study uses a subset of data from an evaluation trial of mental health literacy training for Arabic-speaking religious and community leaders. Our dataset contains the pre-intervention survey responses for 52 Arabic-speaking leaders (69.2% female; mean age = 47.1, SD = 15.3) on the ability to recognise a mental disorder, beliefs about causes for developing mental illness, and two stigma measures, personal stigma, and social distance. Being female was associated with a decrease in personal stigma. An increase in age was associated with an increase in personal stigma. Correct recognition of a mental disorder was associated with decreased personal stigma, and after adjusting for age and gender, significance was retained for the I-would-not-tell-anyone subscale. Endorsing the cause “being a person of weak character” was associated with an increase in personal stigma. There is an urgent need for future research to elucidate stigma to develop effective educational initiatives for stigma reduction among Arabic-speaking leaders.
Background Australia is an ethnically diverse nation. Research has demonstrated an elevated risk of developing a mental illness in culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities yet uptake of mental health services is low. To improve mental health treatment seeking and outcomes for CaLD individuals in Australia there is an urgent need to deeply understand barriers to treatment such as stigma. Using an exploratory qualitative approach, the aim of the study was to explore how CaLD communities’ conceptualise and interpret mental illness and associated beliefs and experiences of stigma. Methods The study focused on three key CaLD groups: the Congolese, Arabic-speaking and Mandarin-speaking communities residing in Sydney, Australia. A series of eight focus group discussions (n = 51) and 26 key informant interviews were undertaken online using Zoom during the period of November to December 2021. Focus group discussions and key informant interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and analysed using NVivo software. Results Three major themes were identified. The first theme related to mental illness terminology used in the three communities. Despite variation in the terms used to refer to ‘mental illness’ all three communities generally distinguished between ‘mental illness’, a more severe condition and ‘mental health problems’, considered to arise due to stressors. The second theme centred on beliefs about mental illness; with all three communities identifying migration-related stressors as contributing to mental illness. Culturally related beliefs were noted for the Congolese participants with the perception of a link between mental illness and supernatural factors, whereas Mandarin-speaking participants highlighted lack of inter and intrapersonal harmony and failure to adhere to values such as filial piety as contributing to mental illness. The final theme related to mental illness related stigma and the various ways it manifested in the three communities including presence of collectivist public stigma felt across all three groups and affiliate (family) stigma reported by the Arabic and Mandarin-speaking groups. Conclusions We found rich diversity in how these communities view and respond to mental illness. Our findings provide some possible insights on both service provision and the mental health system with a view to building effective engagement and pathways to care.
Sensory suppression refers to the phenomenon that sensory input generated by our own actions, such as moving a finger to press a button to hear a tone, elicits smaller neural responses than sensory input generated by external agents. This observation is usually explained via the internal forward model in which an efference copy of the motor command is used to compute a corollary discharge, which acts to suppress sensory input. However, because moving a finger to press a button is accompanied by neural processes involved in preparing and performing the action, it is unclear whether sensory suppression is the result of movement planning, movement execution, or both. To investigate this, in two experiments, we compared event-related potentials to self-generated tones that were produced by voluntary, semivoluntary, or involuntary button-presses, with externally generated tones that were produced by a computer. In Experiment 1, the semivoluntary and involuntary button-presses were initiated by the participant or experimenter, respectively, by electrically stimulating the median nerve in the participant's forearm, and in Experiment 2, by applying manual force to the participant's finger. We found that tones produced by voluntary button-presses elicited a smaller N1 component of the event-related potential than externally generated tones. This is known as N1-suppression. However, tones produced by semivoluntary and involuntary button-presses did not yield significant N1-suppression. We also found that the magnitude of N1-suppression linearly decreased across the voluntary, semivoluntary, and involuntary conditions. These results suggest that movement planning is a necessary condition for producing sensory suppression. We conclude that the most parsimonious account of sensory suppression is the internal forward model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.