Sex differences in beliefs and attitudes towards mental illness: An examination of mental health literacy in a community sample
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Epidemiology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health
- Keywords
- Mental health literacy, Sex, Public belief, Mental illness, Vignette
- Copyright
- © 2015 Gibbons et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Sex differences in beliefs and attitudes towards mental illness: An examination of mental health literacy in a community sample. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e965v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.965v1
Abstract
Objectives: The current study investigated mental health literacy in an Australian sample to examine the influence sex has in the identification of and attitudes towards various aspects of mental illness.
Method: An online questionnaire was completed by 373 participants (267 female, M = 34.87). Participants were randomly assigned a vignette depicting an individual exhibiting the symptoms of one of three types of mental illness and asked to answer questions relating to aspects of mental health literacy.
Results: Males exhibited poorer mental health literacy skills compared to females. Males were less likely to correctly identify the type of mental illness, more likely to rate symptoms as less serious and to perceive the individual as having greater personal control over such symptoms.
Conclusion: Generally, the sample was relatively proficient at correctly identifying mental illness but overall males displayed poorer mental health literacy skills than females.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.