Identification with similar others sharing their experience of coping with depression and its effects on stigmatization and prosocial intentions

Abstract

Addressing the high prevalence of depression among university students and the need to motivate professional help seeking, we examine whether recovery stories featuring a similar - compared to a dissimilar - person sharing their personal experience of coping with depression will reduce stigmatization (attitudes, social distance, prosocial intentions) and the self-stigma of help seeking as mediated by perceived similarity and identification. We conducted a one-factorial between-subject experiment to test the effects of lifestyle similarity on stigmatization and self-stigma of help seeking. 169 students (74.6% female; Mage = 23.5, SD = 3.5) were randomly assigned to read either a recovery story about a similar or dissimilar author’s reflections on their experience of coping with depression or a control story. Contrary to expectations, recovery stories did not reduce stigmatization nor the self-stigma of help seeking, irrespective of whether they were told by a similar or dissimilar person. However, a significant indirect effect on prosocial intentions through perceived similarity and identification as well as several interesting exploratory results point to potential beneficial and detrimental effects of recovery stories and similarity that should be explored in future research.