H Zäske | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

The relationship between mental illness severity and stigma.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate influencing factors for lay perception of mental illness severity and their effects on the stigma of mental illness. METHOD: Selective review including attitude surveys assessing social distance towards different diagnostic labels, and attitudes towards treatment professions, treatment strategies, and psychopharmacotherapy. RESULTS: Lays differentiate in their attitudes towards people with mental illness according to the given diagnostic label, the involved treatment professions or institutions, the applied treatment methods, and the perceived psychosocial disability. CONCLUSION: Beside perceived treatment intensity and diagnostic label, the perception of social disability of mentally ill people accounts for a differentiated stigma. The question arises how anti-stigma-programmes can include the topic of social disability into their messages without risking to strengthen the stigma of mental illness.

Disability Evaluation↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Suicidal behavior--symptom or disorder?

This article examines the diagnostic status of suicidal ideation with and without additional signs of defined or subthreshold mental disorders. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) study on Psychological Problems in General Health Care (PPGHC) show that 8.8% of all general practice patients report that they recently had a wish to be dead. Among patients with acute depressive episodes, the rate is 34.5%, as compared with 1.3% in persons without any sign of mental disorder. Rates of suicidal ideation in persons with subthreshold disorders (10.4%) are similar to the rate in persons with other, nondepressed forms of mental disorders (12.9%). Still, 30.1% of all persons with suicidal ideation do not have a defined mental disorder, and 21.5% do not even have subthreshold disorders. But in these persons also, suicidal ideation is associated with an increased rate of depressive complaints. Suicidal ideation therefore, in any case, can be seen as an indicator of mental problems. But it seems impossible to lower the thresholds of defined mental disorders so that all forms of suicidal ideation will be covered. Instead, suicidal thoughts must be regarded as a symptom with the status of a disorder itself which should be handled as a comorbid condition if other mental disorders co-occur.

Comorbidity↗