METAPHORS AND MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA

Abstract

Does invoking the concept of mental illness in a metaphorical way to describe negative scenarios increase the stigma associated with mental illness? Previous work has shown that using metaphors to think about mental illness (e.g., using the metaphor "darkness" to describe "depression") influences how people reason about mental illnesses like depression (Keefer et al., 2014). The present study seeks to test whether metaphor can work in the opposite direction. For example, does using terms like "crazy" and "insane" to describe rising food prices at the grocery store cause negative meaning to spread back onto the domain of mental illness? Participants in this study first read either a metaphorical or non-metaphorical passage about rising food prices at a grocery store. Next, they read a vignette about a person named John with symptoms of schizophrenia, and they completed a social distance scale about John. Finally, they completed a general mental illness stigma questionnaire. Participants in the metaphor condition showed a marginally greater desire for social distance from John, and this effect was strongest in participants who were most politically conservative. No effects of metaphor were found for the general measure of mental illness stigma. These findings help us to better understand the causes of mental illness stigma, and they identify one area in which the effects of metaphor on thought can be bidirectional.