Culture, Children, and Mental Health Treatment: Special Section on the National Stigma Study-Children

Abstract

Stigma—the prejudice and discrimination linked to individuals with mental illness—has been a mainstay of psychiatric and social science research. Yet a resurgence of academic, policy, and provider interest began in the mid-1990s and culminated in 1999 with the White House Conference on Mental Health and the first-ever Surgeon General’s report on mental illness. Interest has continued, with several programmatic efforts surrounding the recommendations of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. As a result, we now have a solid, if not complete, knowledge base about the nature, levels, and correlates of community-based attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral dispositions toward adults with schizophrenia, depression, and addictive disorders. Importantly, no such foundation had existed on the stigma that may accompany the serious emotional disorders that children and adolescents experience or on the attitudinal barriers to and social ramifications of seeking care. Given the high level of media and professional discussion about the rise in children’s use of psychiatric medication, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence about public perceptions of child and adolescent disorders, the parents and children who experience them, and the need for or reaction to available treatments. In the absence of such data, the tendency is to fall back on what is known about adults’ mental illness and to transfer to our research our own impressions of how cultural subgroups—for example, different racial or ethnic groups or those with more education—think and feel about medical care and the mental health system. Sociologists and other social scientists have long predicted that as modern society became more complex, allowing greater freedom in social interactions, sociodemographic characteristics would be increasingly weak substitutes for cul