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When we meet a person with a cold, we take measures to avoid getting infected. But what about when meeting with those who suffer from alcoholism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders? ..
Of course, various mental illnesses cannot be classified as contagious (although certain emotional states and habits can, in a sense, be transmitted from person to person). However, our (somewhat understandable) desire to withdraw can lead to alienation of patients from society and turning them into outcasts.
Psychologists Jessecae Marsh and Lindzi Shanks conducted several studies to find out how common prejudices about the contagiousness of mental disorders and how they affect the attitude towards mentally ill people.
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- Creativity on the verge of insanity
They first asked 45 students about their attitudes towards people suffering from various mental disorders. 12 diseases were mentioned – alcoholism, attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders … Respondents had to assess the probability (in percent) of “infecting” these diseases.
Responses varied greatly depending on the disease. The most “contagious” students considered alcoholism (56%), anorexia (35,7%), depressive disorder (32,2%) and hypochondria (30,6%). On the other hand, the risk of “getting infected” was estimated to be low for Tourette’s syndrome (4,2%), autism (5,2%), schizophrenia (7,4%) and bipolar disorder (11,2%).
Respondents were also asked other questions, such as how willing they would be to communicate with a mentally unbalanced person. The researchers noted that the reluctance to contact with the sick was most closely associated precisely with the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe “contagiousness” of their disease. Other factors, such as whether the disease is physiological or psychological in nature and whether patients are able to control their symptoms, were of much less interest to respondents.
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In the second experiment, the respondents had to answer whether they are ready to contact a person who suffers from some kind of mental disorder. In this case, the diseases were fictional. The people least likely to want to associate with those whose (fictitious) conditions the authors of the study called “contagious”.
In the third study, students were asked to explain how they imagine the possible mechanisms of “contagion” of mental illness. Almost all of them admitted that diseases like the flu and chickenpox are transmitted through close contact and in a fairly short time. According to the respondents, in order to “catch” a mental illness, prolonged contact is needed – more like years than minutes. Nevertheless, they could not say anything concrete about the mechanisms of such “infection”, limiting themselves to general phrases.
The authors of the study emphasize that in order to improve attitudes towards patients in society, it is very important to conduct educational work, telling that mental illness is not contagious.
Подробнее см. J. Marsh, L. Shanks «Thinking you can catch mental illness: How beliefs about membership attainment and category structure influence interactions with mental health category members», Memory & Cognition, 2014, vol. 42, № 7.