Social Distance and Mental Illness: Attitudes Among Mental Health and Non-Mental Health Professionals and Trainees

Abstract

Increasingly, mental health professionals are providing counseling services to military families. Military parents often struggle with child-rearing issues and experience difficulty meeting the fundamental needs for trust and safety among their children because they are consumed with stress and their own needs. Within this article, military family dynamics are discussed and parenting styles, namely coercive, pampering or permissive and respectful leadership, are explored. The authors conclude by highlighting counseling interventions that may be effective for working with military parents and families.

Stigma of mental illness and multicultural counseling self-efficacy : investigating the implications of the multicultural training environment, mental health literacy, and empathy.

“…Multiculturalism in counseling program curricula is ubiquitous, and culturally competent counselors are clearly the expectation of the field (CACREP, 2015;Celinska & Swazo, 2015). Awareness of the stigma of mental illness, particularly among counselors, is less visible, if present at all, a blind spot that has been recognized in the literature Smith & Cashwell, 2011). Clearly, the literature, including the current study, confirms that both constructs exist among graduate counseling trainees.…”

“…With one of these groups being health care providers, mental illness stigma has been studied primarily among general practice physicians and nurses, with relatively fewer studies published that address mental illness stigma among mental health care providers such as psychiatrists and psychologists (Schulze, 2007). Even fewer focus on stigma among nonmedical counseling professionals, such as social workers and mental health counselors (Ahmedani, 2001;Henderson et al, 2014;Smith & Cashwell, 2011).…”

“…Other researchers have found that mental illness stigma among mental health care providers may have a role in reduced treatment seeking and service receipt among those with mental illness diagnoses (Horsfall, Cleary, & Hunt, 2010;Stuart et al, 2012), particularly those individuals who identify as members of racial or ethnic minorities (Broman, 2012;Dobalian & Rivers, 2008). Smith and Cashwell (2011) found that professional counselors were consistently absent as participants in the majority of the published literature that included mental health care providers, and investigated whether this professional population might be different from other mental health providers due to differences in theoretical background and training. The authors reasoned that humanistic values, such as empathy, and focus on the counseling relationship endemic to counseling as supported by Hansen (2007) could impact the extent to which counselors stigmatize their clients who are diagnosed with a mental illness and the nature of any stigmatization that does occur.…”

“…Early studies of mental illness stigma among college students focused largely on nursing students (Dixon, 1967;Napoletano, 1981), and gradually came to include medical students and general health care professionals, and eventually those in the mental health care fields. Of this last group, little is mentioned in the literature of counselors, either as students or as practitioners (Smith & Cashwell, 2011). With the findings in the few studies that have been published indicating that mental health care providers may hold more stigmatizing attitudes toward mental illness than does the general public Schultz, 2007), it seems that education and awareness of mental illness stigma may be important pieces to consider in counselor training programs.…”

“…This blind spot has been noticed by researchers and as the literature of the stigma of mental illness expands, it increasingly includes mental health care professionals, such as counselors (e.g., Lauber et al, 2006;Smith & Cashwell, 2011).…”