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PEER-REVIEWED
Comparative Study
| Published: March 31, 2019
Attitudes towards Depression in India: Lower Socio-Economic-Status Groups May Demonstrate Higher Tolerance
Department of Psychology San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA Google Scholar More about the auther
DIP: 18.01.105/20190701
DOI: 10.25215/0701.105
ABSTRACT
By any measure, depression is a severe problem in India. Adding to the suffering associated with the condition itself are judgmental and stigmatizing attitudes that are nearly ubiquitous in all strata of Indian society. Such social disapproval prevents millions of people from seeking appropriate medical attention which in-turn leads to added distress and increased burdens for affected individuals and their families. A more granular understanding the social attitudes towards depressed individuals may help in policy-makers devise campaigns to reduce depression-related stigmatization – and is therefore an important health priority. At first glance, levels of stigma and misinformation with respect to people suffering from depression are uniformly high and oppressively negative. However, when responding to a vignette, individuals from low socio-economic-status (SES) backgrounds unexpectedly tended to be more accepting (i.e. showed less social distance) towards people described as having symptoms of depression compared to individuals from higher SES backgrounds (Study 1). However, this difference in SES-based levels of stigma disappeared when depression was labelled as a mental disorder in a questionnaire (Study 2). This finding is relevant in designing interventions to combat the stigma attached to depression.
Keywords
Depression, Attitude, Socio-Economic-Status (SES), India, Social Distance
This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2019, G Sur
Received: March 05, 2019; Revision Received: March 26, 2019; Accepted: March 31, 2019
Article Overview
ISSN 2348-5396
ISSN 2349-3429
18.01.105/20190701
10.25215/0701.105
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Published in Volume 07, Issue 1, January-March, 2019