Intervention study on the stigma of mental illness in college students

Objective To investigate the automatic implicit attitude and explicit stigma of mental illness, and the intervention effectiveness on the stigma of mental illness in college students. Methods Single category implicit association test(SC-IAT) and questionnaire survey were used to study the degree of implicit and explicit mental illness stigma among 30 college students of Peking University, and investigated the effect of two strategies, education and contact.Data were analyzed by SPSS 22.0 with t-test and variance analysis. Results The D values of SC-IAT in the three dimensions of cognitive evaluation, emotional response and behavioral tendency of college students were 0.29±0.37, 0.24±0.43, and 0.10±0.43.There was a statistically significant difference between the cognitive evaluation dimension, the emotional response dimension and 0(t=4.069, P 0.05). The correct rates of questions "Which of the following situations do you think are considered mentally unhealthy? " and "Which of the following disorders are mental illnesses" (42±13)%, (54±13)%) increased after receiving educational intervention ((49±12)%, (64±13)%), the difference was statistically significant (F=3.682, P<0.05; F=3.576, P<0.05). Conclusion College students have implicit mental illness stigma, educational and contact intervention strategies can help improve college students' understanding of relevant knowledge, and cannot improve the level of implicit stigma of college students on mental illness. Key words: Mental illness stigma; Implicit stigma; Single category implicit association test; Stigma intervention