Abstract
Background: Mental health literacy has received increasing attention as a useful strategy to promote early identification of mental disorders, reduce stigma and enhance help-seeking behaviors. However, despite the abundance of research on mental health literacy interventions, there is the absence of evaluations of current available mental health literacy measures and related psychometrics. We conducted a scoping review to bridge the gap. Methods: We searched PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and ERIC for relevant studies. We only focused on quantitative studies and English publications, however, we didn't limit study participants, locations, or publication dates. We excluded non-English studies, and did not check the grey literature (non peer-reviewed publications or documents of any type) and therefore may have missed some eligible measures. Results: We located 401 studies that include 69 knowledge measures (14 validated), 111 stigma measures (65 validated), and 35 help-seeking related measures (10 validated). Knowledge measures mainly investigated the ability of illness identification, and factual knowledge of mental disorders such as terminology, etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, and consequences. Stigma measures include those focused on stigma against mental illness or the mentally ill; self-stigma ; experienced stigma; and stigma against mental health treatment and help-seeking. Help-seeking measures included those of help-seeking attitudes, intentions to seek help, and actual help-seeking behaviors. Conclusions: Our review provides a compendium of available mental health literacy measures to facilitate applying existing measures or developing new measures. It also provides a solid database for future research on systematically assessing the quality of the included measures.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 291 |
| Journal | BMC Psychiatry |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 17 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We would like to acknowledge that this study is supported by Yifeng Wei’s Doctoral Research Award - Priority Announcement: Knowledge Translation/ Bourse de recherché, issued by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Dr. McGrath is supported by a Canada Research Chair. In addition, we would like to express deep appreciation to Ms. Catherine Morgan for her tremendous help with data collection and analysis, and the health librarian, Ms. Robin Parker, who helped with designing the search strategies of this review.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Wei et al.
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Mental health
