Abstract
BackgroundThe impact of illness labels on the stigma experiences of individuals with mental health problems is a matter of ongoing debate. Some argue that labels have a negative influence on judgments and should be avoided in favour of information emphasising the existence of a continuum of mental health/illness. Others believe that behavioral symptoms are more powerful influencers of stigma than labels. The phenomenon has received little attention in adolescent research, despite the critical importance of the peer group at this developmental stage. This study employs a novel experimental design to examine the impact of the depression label and continuum information on adolescents’ responses to peers with depression.MethodsParticipants were 156 adolescents, 76 male, 80 female (M = 16.25 years; SD = .361), assigned to one of three conditions (Control, Label, Continuum). Participants respond to four audio-visual vignette characters (two clinically depressed) on three occasions. Outcome measures included judgment of the mental health of the vignette characters and emotional responses to them.ResultsNeither the provision of a depression label or continuum information influenced perceptions of the mental health of the characters in the audio-visual vignettes or participants’ emotional responses to them.ConclusionThe findings have implications for the design of interventions to combat depression stigma with adolescents. Interventions should not necessarily target perceptions of psychiatric labels, but rather perceptions of symptomatic behaviour.
Highlights
The impact of illness labels on the stigma experiences of individuals with mental health problems is a matter of ongoing debate
Sympathy, irritation, fear, and anxiety can be detected by a person who is stigmatised, but these emotional responses can shape the subsequent behaviour of the stigmatiser [14]
This study explores the effects of experimentally manipulating depression labels and continuum information on adolescent emotional responses and mental health evaluations of hypothetical male peers with depression, as male adolescents with depression evoke stronger stigma responses from peers than their female counterparts [23, 24]
Summary
The impact of illness labels on the stigma experiences of individuals with mental health problems is a matter of ongoing debate. Outcome measures included judgment of the mental health of the vignette characters and emotional responses to them. Research on category labels is of interest to those studying the effects of mental disorder labels on subsequent stigma responses, because diagnostic classifications augment public perceptions of the discreteness and differentness of people with mental disorders [9]. Other researchers have found that agreement with a mental illness label for depression does not reduce anger but, paradoxically, is associated with an increase in both sympathy and fear [13]. There is a widely cited link between emotions of sympathy, anger and fear, and behavioural intentions toward persons with mental disorders including depression [12, 15, 16]. No previous experimental studies have manipulated the depression label to assess its impact on emotional reactions
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