Mental health literacy, stigma, shame and self criticism: a study among young adults

Abstract

Mental health literacy (MHL) and mental illness stigma (MIS) represent new horizons of study and intervention, particularly important, for both communities and clinical settings (European Commission Portuguese Ministry of Health, 2010). In this paper we aimed to: a) describe a clinical sample (CS) and non clinical group (NCG) in aspects related to family history of psychopathology, contact with mental illness and “learning about mental illness”; b) differentiate groups in terms of MHL, shame and self criticism; c) test associations between MHL with shame and self criticism; and, in the clinical sample, d) test the relationship between self stigma, shame and self criticism; e) explore the predictor role of other’s support in self stigma. To do so we collected data from a sample of 187 young adults, including CS and NCG, using: a Sociobiographic Questionnaire; Opinions about Mental Illness (Cohen Struening, 1962); Other as Shamer Scale (Goss, Gilbert Allan, 1994); Internalized Shame Scale (Cook, 1994); and Forms of Self Criticizing and Self Reassuring Scale (Gilbert, Clarke, Hempel, Miles, Irons, 2004). Our results show that: most of the subjects learned what is mental illness at school; CS know more people that has or had mental illness than NCG; there are no differences on MHL within samples; shame and self criticism are higher in the CS and correlate with self stigma; others support predict self-stigma. Several research and clinical implications are presented.

Keywords

• mental health literacy
• shame
• self criticism
• clinical sample
• community sample
• young-adults