Mental health literacy: Public knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders in mainland China

Abstract

This study was concerned with the general mental health literacy of lay people in mainland China. It replicates in part many studies done in America, Australia, and Europe. A total of 212 participants were asked to read vignettes depicting people with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, depression, bipolar disorder, stress, child attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), child depression, and child "daily troubles." For each vignette they were asked to label the vignette character's main problem, to evaluate various suggestions for helping that person, to rate their attitudes towards the character, and finally their confidence in all their responses. Overall ADHD was the best identified, and bipolar disorder and stress were the least frequently identified mental health disorders. Professional help from a psychologist/psychiatrist was most frequently endorsed for all disorders, which was followed by help from parents or friends. No significant correlation was found between psychological knowledge and "correct" recognition as defined by the psychiatric label. The findings were discussed in relation to the Chinese language and culture, social beliefs about mental disorders, and suggestions for improvements in mental health literacy. Limitations of this study were also acknowledged, particularly with respect to sampling. Suggestions for future work research were considered.

An analysis of stigma and suicide literacy in responses to suicides broadcast on social media

“…Secondly, the analysis of social media posts can be helpful to identify the level of suicide literacy. Results (Table ) showed that poor knowledge of signs and treatments of suicide was evident, a finding that is consistent with other research on mental health literacy of Chinese people (Gong & Furnham, ; Rong et al, ; Wong & He, ). A total of 11.67% of posts conveyed incorrect knowledge regarding signs and treatments of suicide.…”

Mental health literacy in Hong Kong

“…The fictitious person described in the vignette was described as being too preoccupied with being clean, thus this may cause confusion with the correct OCD label. Similar mislabelling can also be found in Gong and Furnham (2014) and Loo et al's (2012) studies in which many participants also used the term "mysophobia" or in Chinese "潔癖" to refer to the symptoms described in the vignette. From these two studies, one may imply that the term "mysophobia" may 13 be used colloquially to refer to people that are fixated with cleanliness.…”

“…The mental disorders in the vignettes included post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), dependent personality disorder (DPD), schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, social phobia, panic disorder, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder (APD) in which all of the vignettes were adapted from previous studies (Jorm, Christensen & Griffiths, 2005;Jorm, Wright & Morgan, 2007;Furnham & Anthony, 2010;Gong & Furnham, 2014).…”

“…Other studies on MHL have used similar sized samples but tended to recruit people in public places using printed questionnaires (Found & Duarte, 2012;Gong & Furnham, 2014). Clearly a large (N> 1000) representative sample would be most desirable.…”

A systematic analysis of online broadcasts of suicidality in China

“…However, previous studies found that 23% to 60% of suicide attempters had psychiatric disorders (Gunnell & Frankel, ; Ikunaga, Nath, & Skinner, ). This inconsistency might be due to a poor mental health literacy among Chinese people (Gong & Furnham, ; Rong et al, ; Wong & He, ), which leads to an underestimation of the prevalence of psychiatric disorders.…”