Is education of health professionals encouraging stigma towards the mentally ill?

An Elective Psychiatric Course to Reduce Pharmacy Students’ Social Distance Toward People With Severe Mental Illness

“…[28][29][30] Personal experience is a critical contributor to how much social distance a person desires when they interact with someone with mental illness. Several studies have found that individuals who have a personal connection to a patient, friend, or family member with mental illness desire less social distance and hold more positive attitudes towards mentally ill patients compared to those without such relationships.…”

Stigma of mental illness and multicultural counseling self-efficacy : investigating the implications of the multicultural training environment, mental health literacy, and empathy.

“…The authors posited that, while familiarity of mental illness by way of contact is important for stigma reduction, factors such as the setting in which the contact occurs and the level of intimacy of the contact directly impact attitudes. This supported Sadow et al (2002), who found in a sample of 97 nursing students enrolled in a two-year nursing program in Boston, that the only variable associated with decreased stigma of mental illness was whether a participant reported having a friend who had a mental illness.…”

“…Sadow, Ryder, and Webster (2002) for example, found among a sample of nursing students that only those students who had a friend with mental illness had lower levels of mental illness stigma. In the same study, students' work experience with a person who had a serious mental illness had no relationship with stigma scores or were associated with increased levels of stigma.…”

“…Researchers have already called upon medical professionals, such as physicians and nurses, to become more aware of the stigmatizing attitudes that have negatively impacted the medical care of their patients with mental illnesses (Clarke et al, 2007;Freidrich et al, 2013;Sadow et al, 2002).…”

“…Professionals in the field of mental health care also experience courtesy stigma, at best being blamed for having nebulous interpersonal boundaries or offering ineffective treatment and, at worst, being depicted by the media as subjecting clients to invasive or cruel treatment (Hinshaw, 2007;Sadow et al, 2002;Schulze, 2007). As the impact of courtesy stigma on the professionals who treat individuals with mental illnesses becomes more directly the focus of study, researchers have referred to courtesy stigma in the context of the practice of mental health care as associative stigma (Kennedy, Abell, & Mennicke, 2014;Verhaeghe & Bracke, 2012).…”