Social context affects mental health stigma

Abstract Prior research shows mental health stigma is context-dependent and blocks help-seeking behaviors. Any applied solutions will require basic research to understand these contextual nuances. The present paper presents two timed Likert-type rating studies in which participants scored photographs of individuals with mental health diagnoses and other control condition labels in different social contexts. In the first study (N = 99), participants rated the individuals in a professional context and in a non-professional context. The second study (N = 99) systematically manipulated the attractiveness of the individuals depicted. Professional context moderated mental health stigma, indicating that, relative to control label conditions, participants were less accepting of an individual with a mental health diagnosis label as a medical clinician than as a next-door neighbor. Attractiveness had a uniform effect across all the label conditions, which produced a compounding additive effect in which a mental health diagnosis and low attractiveness negatively impacted the ratings simultaneously. The study used timed implicit judgments to demonstrate empirically how previously unstudied social contexts can affect mental health stigma. Understanding how such contextual effects affect stigma is a prerequisite for the development of interventions to overcome the barriers stigma creates for access to treatment and prevention.