Interventions to reduce stigma towards people with severe mental illness: Systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

This review evaluates the evidence on what interventions are effective in reducing public stigma towards people with severe mental illness, defined as schizophrenia, psychosis or bipolar disorder. We included 62 randomised controlled trials of contact interventions, educational interventions, mixed contact and education, family psychoeducation programs, and hallucination simulations. Contact interventions led to small-to-medium reductions in stigmatising attitudes (d = 0.39, 95% CI: 0.22 to 0.55) and desire for social distance (d = 0.59, 95% CI: 0.37 to 0.80) post-intervention, but these were reduced after adjusting for publication bias (d = 0.24 and d = 0.40, respectively). Effects did not ..