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Anxiety, bulimia, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and schizophrenia: what do you think about their aetiology, dangerousness, social distance, and treatment? A latent class analysis approach

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Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Mental illness stigma is a serious societal problem and a critical impediment to treatment seeking for mentally ill people. To improve the understanding of mental illness stigma, this study focuses on the simultaneous analysis of people’s aetiological beliefs, attitudes (i.e. perceived dangerousness and social distance), and recommended treatments related to several mental disorders by devising an over-arching latent structure that could explain the relations among these variables.

Methods

Three hundred and sixty university students randomly received an unlabelled vignette depicting one of six mental disorders to be evaluated on the four variables on a Likert-type scale. A one-factor Latent Class Analysis (LCA) model was hypothesized, which comprised the four manifest variables as indicators and the mental disorder as external variable.

Results

The main findings were the following: (a) a one-factor LCA model was retrieved; (b) alcohol and drug addictions are the most strongly stigmatized; (c) a realistic opinion about the causes and treatment of schizophrenia, anxiety, bulimia, and depression was associated to lower prejudicial attitudes and social rejection.

Conclusion

Beyond the general appraisal of mental illness an individual might have, the results generally point to the acknowledgement of the specific features of different diagnostic categories. The implications of the present results are discussed in the framework of a better understanding of mental illness stigma.

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Notes

  1. The intermediate category for the causal beliefs and recommended treatment variables was included for the actual possibility of supporting at once different but not necessarily mutually independent beliefs, which can indeed be combined together. Further, the empirical distribution of the raw total scores supported this choice. Conversely, the raw score distribution of perceived dangerousness and social distance variables led to a simpler, binary transformation into categories representing the extreme endpoints of the two variables.

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Conflict of interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, via Venezia 8, 35131, Padova, Italy

    Stefania Mannarini & Marilisa Boffo

  2. Interdepartmental Centre for Family Research, FISPPA, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Stefania Mannarini

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  1. Stefania Mannarini
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  2. Marilisa Boffo
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Correspondence to Stefania Mannarini.

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Mannarini, S., Boffo, M. Anxiety, bulimia, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and schizophrenia: what do you think about their aetiology, dangerousness, social distance, and treatment? A latent class analysis approach. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 50, 27–37 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-014-0925-x

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