Buck Up, Buttercup: How Prior Exposure to Mentally Ill Individuals Impacts Mental Illness Origin Beliefs

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, mental illness activists and researchers have promoted stigma reduction through two methods: on one hand, increasing interaction with individuals with mental illnesses, and on the other, shifting the social perception that mental illness is a behavioral failing that can be controlled if enough effort is exerted by the individual to an understanding that mental illnesses is a biological illness like any other. While these two stigma reduction techniques have been studied separately, there has been no research examining the ways in which they interact. This paper uses linguistic analysis software to analyze a naturalistic comment sample from YouTube to further understand the interaction between a person’s familiarity with individuals with mental illnesses and their endorsement of mental illnesses as either biological or controllable in origin. Contrary to expectations, past exposure to individuals with mental illnesses negatively correlated with endorsement of both biological and controllable origin beliefs. Implications and further directions for stigma reduction techniques and research are discussed. Keywords: mental illness, stigma, stigma reduction, biological origin, controllable origin, intergroup contact, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC).