Stigma towards mental illness in med students: you label me, I label you?

Abstract

Introduction Evidence suggests that besides having stigmatizing misconceptions towards people with mental illness, medical students and doctors often resist seeking help for their own mental issues. This is a vulnerable group for stress and other mental health problems, due not only to professional burden but also high perfectionism and low self-compassion. Objectives To analyse the relationship between mental health stigma (MHS) and other variables related to personality and emotional states in a sample of medical students. Methods 634 medicine and dentistry students (mean age = 21.6±6.9;81.4% female) answered to a survey including sociodemographic data, self-perception of psychological health/SPPH and the Portuguese validated versions of: Link’s Perceived Discrimination and Devaluation (PDD) scale to assess MHS and its two dimensions - social stigma/SocS and self-stigma/SelS; Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21); Neff’s Self-Compassion Scale (SCS); and Big Three Perfectionism Scale (BTPS). Correlations, t-student tests and linear regressions were performed with SPSS 27.0. Results Stigma correlated negatively to SPPH and positively to DASS, the negative poles of SCS (self-judgement, isolation and over-identification) and BTPS second-order factors (all from p<.05 to p<.01). No gender differences in MHS were observed. Participants with higher mean levels of total and SelS had significantly higher scores in all DASS dimensions and lower SPPH; participants with higher SocS also scored higher in DASS, but didn’t reveal lower SPPH. Isolation was a significant predictor of SocS (R2=2.8%;p<.05); isolation and narcissistic perfectionism were significant predictors of SelS (R2=11%;p<.01). Conclusions Our results highlight the importance of including MHS as a main need in the curricula of future doctors. Disclosure No significant relationships.

Keywords

• Mental Health Stigma
• psychological distress
• perfectionism