Public Attitudes Toward Mental Illness: A Review of the Literature

Iri conjunction with the rise of social psychiatry as an increasingly accepted ideologic and strategic base, there has developed widespread interest in public attitudes toward mental illness. Knowledge of such attitudes is not only germane to those concerned with the origins and maintenance of disturbed behavior, but critically important to workers involved in primary prevention programs, early intervention, and community treatment of psychiatric patients. Both administrators and clinicians benefit from acquaintance with public attitudes toward the presence of psychiatric facilities and patients in their neighborhoods. Psychiatric rehabilitation is facilitated when mental health professionals recognize the social realities that their patients encounter in their daily living. In short, it is becoming generally recognized that mental patients, and those who deal with them, exist in the larger framework of society and that it is imperative, in both planning and carrying out treatment programs, to be aware of the attitudes toward mental illness and treatment that prevail in this larger framework. Despite longstanding awareness of the discrepancies between what people say and what they do, the link between attitude and behavior has been deemed sufficiently meaningful to warrant extensive research regarding public attitudes toward mental illness. Since the late 1940's, when the first studies were designed, there has emerged a substantial body of research concerning the delineation of attitudes held by the public, characteristics of disturbed behavior that influence such attitudes, characteristics of respondents that are themselves associated with variations in attitude, and the relationship between attitudes and behavior.