Explicit and Implicit Attitudes of Canadian Psychiatrists toward People with Mental Illness

Objective:People with mental illness suffer stigma and discrimination across various contexts, including the health care setting, and clinicians' attitudes play an important role in perpetuating stigma. Effective stigma-reduction interventions for physicians require a better understanding of explicit (that is, conscious and controllable) and implicit (that is, subconscious and automatic) forms of bias, and of predictors and moderators of stigma.Methods:Members of a Canadian university psychiatry department and of the Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA) were invited to participate in a web-based study consisting of 2 measures of explicit attitudes, the Social Distance Scale (SDS) and the Opening Minds Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC), and 1 measure of implicit attitudes, the Implicit Association Test (IAT).Results:Thirty-five psychiatry residents and 68 psychiatrists completed the study (response rates of 12.1% for the university sample and 3.3% for the CPA sample). Participants desired greater ...