Gender Influences On Mental Illness Perception

The bulk of the studies evaluating gender influences on mental illness perception, however, seem to focus on media impacts, the characterizations of mentally ill persons in popular culture, and long term attitudes towards the mentally ill in relation to mental health literacy or illness recognition, usually taking the form of a meta or content analysis (Pirkis, Blood, Francis, & McCallum, 2006; Lauber, Nordt, Falcato, & Rossler, 2003; Nairn, 2007). When literature utilizes an experimental design concerning mental illness perception it usually occurs at two ends of a spectrum; the research either focuses on very generalized mental health symptoms or highly stigmatized illnesses such as schizophrenia. This is concerning because a highly-stigmatized disorder will no doubt …show more content…
However, gender is rarely acknowledged as one of them, especially in regards to how gender affects a) judgments made by a non-mentally ill observer; and b) judgements of a mentally ill individual. Therefore, the goals of the present study are to ascertain the perception of mentally ill persons based on their gender and determine how the gender of an individual observing a mentally ill person affects how mental illness is perceived. Also, because the mental illness focused on in a large majority of the literature is usually something severe, this research focuses specifically on depression. Thus, based on previous literature, it was hypothesized that: 1) mental illness would be evaluated negatively no matter the condition, 2) the vignette of the female with mental illness would be rated more harshly than the male or control conditions, 3) male participants would judge those with mental illness more negatively than female participants, 4) and that a participant gender and vignette gender interaction would be