Narratives and Mental Illness: Understanding the Factors That Impact Stigmatizing Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions

Entertainment television has been explored to reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward mental illness by incorporating positive stories about characters with mental illness. Guided by mediated contact theory and the extended elaboration likelihood model, this study examines whether exposure and engagement with entertainment narratives, featuring characters with mental illnesses of varying levels of public stigma, impacts stigmatizing attitudes and intentions to interact with individuals with mental illness generally. Participants (n = 234) were randomized to one of the three conditions: (1) a more stigmatized mental illness (schizophrenia), (2) a less stigmatized mental illness (depression), or (3) a non-mental illness control (cancer). Participants in the more stigmatized condition reported significantly less identification with characters than those in the less stigmatized condition, and greater identification with the characters were associated with more positive attitudes and behavioral intentions. Narrative counterarguing was associated with less positive attitudes and intentions toward people with mental illness. Implications based on these findings include identifying ways to increase engagement with less familiar mental illnesses to optimize the positive outcomes associated with narrative engagement.