A heavier burden of stigma? Comparing outpatient and inpatient help-seeking stigma.

Abstract

Although research on the stigma associated with mental health care has grown substantially in the last decade, most of this work focuses on outpatient treatment; recent research on the stigma associated with inpatient treatment is strikingly absent. In this study, we examined the stigma of seeking professional psychological help from outpatient and inpatient treatment settings. College students (N = 350) at a large, Midwestern university completed three commonly used mental health stigma scales which we modified to reflect either outpatient stigma or inpatient stigma. Overall, participants’ ratings on inpatient and outpatient stigma were significantly different (partial η2 = .39). Compared to outpatient treatment, participants reported significantly greater public stigma and self-stigma associated with inpatient treatment (partial η2 = .14 and .16, respectively) as well as poorer attitudes about inpatient treatment (partial η2 = .36). Path analysis with bias-corrected bootstrapping indicated that the relationships between inpatient and outpatient public stigma with their respective attitudes toward seeking treatment were partially mediated by their respective self-stigmas. This differs slightly from previous findings demonstrating support for full mediation. Research and clinical implications are discussed.

Personal growth initiative, mental health stigma, and intentions to seek professional psychological help: A model extension.

“…Future research among more diverse samples is needed to replicate the present findings. Furthermore, our study measured intentions to seek mental health care, but did not specify the treatment setting; recent research regarding the stigma of seeking inpatient treatment has demonstrated a unique path of public stigma toward help-seeking intentions (Mathison et al, 2021). More work is needed to examine the role of PGI as a motivator of treatment-seeking behavior across different types of providers and settings.…”

Disentangling Mental Illness and Help-Seeking Stigmas

“…The extant literature reveals robust bivariate correlations between public stigma of seeking help and self-stigma of seeking help among clinical community and clinical university student samples (e.g., Tucker et al, 2013), general samples of college students (e.g., Brenner, Colvin et al, 2020;Brenner, Cornish et al, 2020;Heath et al, 2018), college student women and men (e.g., Lannin et al, 2015), community adults (e.g., Brenner, Colvin et al, 2020), and military personnel (e.g., Seidman, Wade et al, 2019;Wade et al, 2015). Cross-sectional studies examining these relationships within a larger theoretical model (i.e., controlling for covariates) and denoting public stigma of seeking help as a predictor of self-stigma of seeking help have consistently found support for this relationship, including among a clinical sample of military personnel (Wade et al, 2015); college students in the United States within the context of career counseling (Ludwikowski et al, 2009); as well as college students in the United States (e.g., Brenner, Cornish et al, 2020;Heath et al, 2018;Lannin et al, 2015;Mathison et al, 2021), Turkey (Topkaya et al, 2017), Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Romania, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates (Vogel et al, 2017). One exception should be noted: this path was nonsignificant in Portugal (Vogel et al, 2017).…”

Six strategies to help reluctant patients to disclose their suicidal thoughts.

“…Self-stigma may result in secrecy or concealment. The stigma may be even greater for patients who have spent time in a psychiatric hospital (Mathison et al, 2021). Some men may not seek treatment or discuss suicidal thoughts in treatment because doing so could be seem as a sign of weakness, or conflict with the traditional masculine image of being independent and self-reliant (Coleman et al, 2020; Rasmussen et al, 2018).…”