Public conceptions of mental illness in 1950 and 1996: What is mental illness and is it to be feared?
Public conceptions of mental illness in 1950 and 1996: What is mental illness and is it to be feared?
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DOI：
10.2307/2676305
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发表时间：
2000-06-01
影响因子：
5
通讯作者：
Pescosolido, BA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Phelan, JC;Link, BG;Pescosolido, BA
20世纪50年代，公众对精神疾病的定义比精神病学更加狭隘和极端，对精神疾病患者的恐惧和排斥态度也很常见。一些指标表明，自那时以来，精神疾病的定义可能已经扩大，排斥和负面刻板印象可能有所减少。然而，随着时间的推移，缺乏可比数据使我们无法对这些问题得出明确的结论。为了解决这个问题，1996 年综合社会调查的心理健康模块重复了一个关于精神疾病含义的问题，该问题于 1950 年首次向全国代表性样本提出。对 1950 年和 1996 年结果的比较表明，在此期间，精神疾病的概念有所扩大，包括了更大比例的非精神疾病，但对精神疾病患者有暴力行为的看法大幅增加，而不是减少。这一增长仅限于将精神疾病视为精神病的受访者。在这些受访者中，从 1950 年到 1996 年，描述精神病患者有暴力行为的比例增加了近 2 1/2 倍。我们讨论了一种可能性，即人们已经真正接受多种形式的精神疾病，将其视为“我们”中的一个人可能发生的事情，但精神病患者仍然是“他们”，比半个世纪前更令人恐惧。
In the 1950s, the public defined mental illness in much narrower and more extreme terms than did psychiatry, and fearful and rejecting attitudes toward people with mental illnesses were common. Several indicators suggest that definitions of mental illness may have broadened and that rejection and negative stereotypes may have decreased since that time. However, lack of comparable data over time prevents us from drawing firm conclusions on these questions. To address this problem, the Mental Health Module of the 1996 General Social Survey repeated a question regarding the meaning of mental illness that was first asked of a nationally representative sample in 1950. A comparison of 1950 and 1996 results shows that conceptions of mental illness have broadened somewhat over this time period to include a greater proportion of non-psychotic disorders, but that perceptions that mentally ill people are violent are frightening substantially increased, rather than decreased. This increase was limited to respondents who viewed mental illness in terms of psychosis. Among such respondents, the proportion who described a mentally ill person as being violent increased by nearly 2 1/2 times between 1950 and 1996 We discuss the possibility that there has been a real move toward acceptance of many forms of mental illness as something that can happen to one of "us," but that people with psychosis remain a "them" who are more feared than they were half a century ago.