The relationship between public stigma associated with psychosis and previous contact with service users

Abstract

Objectives: Stigma is believed to be one of the major barriers for the recovery process of persons with psychosis. Stigma-reducing program is believed to be able to enhance public knowledge and to improve treatment outcome as well as to alleviate discrimination and stigma. The current study therefore aimed at examining the level of public stigma of psychosis and its relationship with public attitudes towards patients with psychosis. The relationship of public’s stigma level, previous contact of persons with psychosis and the social distance scores on vignette will be studied.

Method: Seventy-seven subjects were recruited from public health talks on psychosis organized by the Jockey Club Early Psychosis Project (JECP).Public stigma towards psychosis would be tested by two scales: the validated tool The Public Stigma Scale (Chan et al., 2009; Mak et al., 2012) and The Social Distance Scales (Chung, Chen & Liu2001). Other assessments included subjects’ previous contact with patients of psychosis and their history of working in the medical field.

Results: The mean age of the subjects was 43.51 years (SD= 13.295); 23(32.5%) were male and 52 were female. In all, 15 (19.5%) had the history of working in medical field and 62(80.5%) worked in non-medical field; 49(63.6%) had pervious contact with the patients with psychosis while 28 (36.4%) did not have such experience. In our study, no correlation was found between overall stigma and number of contacts. Also, no correlation was found between overall stigma with gender and occupation. And we found that The Public Stigma and social distance were correlated. Subjects who had lower scores in the public stigma scale were related with less rejecting attitudes towards patient with psychosis.

Conclusion: In this study, we found that pervious contact did not have significant correlation with the stigma and attitude. Gender and history of working in medical field difference also did not have significant correction with stigma and attitudes. Further studies are recommended to explore more effective strategies in stigma-reducing programme.