Mental health stigma is referred to as negative or discriminating attitudes towards the topic of mental health and those who may struggle with their mental health. Mental health stigma occurs throughout society and negatively affects those trying to seek help for poor mental health. My experience with mental health stigma changed during my final year of my psychology undergraduate degree. I wanted to base my research project/dissertation on an area affecting people’s mental health. After careful consideration, I decided to base my research project on the COVID-19 pandemic and how it affected people’s mental health.
“If more people felt comfortable talking about their
mental health, this would reduce mental health stigma
and increase mental health awareness too..”
One of my worries during the planning of my project was how comfortable people were talking about their mental health, and how comfortable people were talking about how the pandemic may have affected it. Furthermore, the pandemic had left many not wanting to travel onto my university campus to take part in in-person research, so I chose to carry out online questionnaires that people could answer from their own devices, if they felt comfortable to.
“Mental health stigma affected my research project…”
Mental health stigma affected my research project after I realised that I may not get a large sample size for my project unless I made the questionnaires anonymous. The anonymity helped people feel more comfortable and meant they could be more honest in rating their mental health experiences without their answers being able to link back to them. If more people felt comfortable talking about their mental health, this would reduce mental health stigma and increase mental health awareness too.
Writing the discussion section of my research project, I needed to discuss strengths and weaknesses of my research, and then the options for further research based on my findings. I soon realised that people were more comfortable talking about their mental health when they were anonymous, but the anonymity meant that there was no way that in another study that any follow-up research could involve diving deeper into how the pandemic affected those people’s mental health, as the people could not be linked to their questionnaire answers.
“I soon realised that people were more comfortable talking
about their mental health when they were anonymous.”
This suggests that mental health stigma can affect mental health research negatively in more than one way. One way being that due to trying to get more honest or accurate answers, the research answers are kept anonymous, so people feel more comfortable. But this can still have a negative effect on the research, as when you make the research anonymous, there is no option to follow-up any of the results, so the research almost feels like it has hit a dead-end.
“This suggests that mental health stigma can affect mental
health research negatively in more than one way.”
Another way pointed out with how mental health stigma can affect mental health research is that without the more honest or accurate answers, the level of detail in the research suffers, and the accuracy of trying to apply the mental health research to society decreases.
Both of these issues are due to mental health stigma restricting research into how poor mental health can affect people and restricting people being able to talk about their mental health
York Ending Stigma
To find out more about our work and to join us to end mental health stigma in York, please refer to our website https://yorkcvs.org.uk/york-ending-stigma/ or email us on yes@yorkCVS.org.uk