Cross-sectional Survey: Public Attitude toward Mental Illness in China

Anson Chui Yan Tang

doi:10.23937/2469-5823/1510025

Abstract

C l i n M e d International Library Citation: Tang ACY (2015) Cross-sectional Survey: Public Attitude toward Mental Illness in China. Int Arch Nurs Health Care 1:025 Received: October 13, 2015: Accepted: December 27, 2015: Published: December 31, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Tang ACY. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Tang. Int Arch Nurs Health Care 2015, 1:3 ISSN: 2469-5823

Highlights

Public attitude toward mental illness is usually negative in many western and Asian countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The public expressed uneasiness when getting contact with mentally ill people. Their unfamiliarity with mental illness which is yet properly addressed could be an obstacle of mental rehabilitation
The public has much misunderstanding about mental illness which might contribute to their negative attitude toward mental illness, especially on issues related to social contact

Summary

Introduction

Public attitude toward mental illness is usually negative in many western and Asian countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Cross-sectional studies have reported that 30-40% of the respondents believed that mental rehabilitation centers should be far away from residential areas and expressed that it was inappropriate to locate those centers near housing estates [5,10,11] Evidence in these studies reveal that mentally ill people and their significant others are discriminated against in daily social contact. The stigmatization they received was significantly higher than received by those with other chronic health conditions such as diabetes mellitus [12] Such discrimination toward the mentally ill and their significant others lowers their self-esteem and reduces their engagement to the community, and encourages inequity in health care because they receive less support from the community [7,13,14].

Results

Discussion

Conclusion