mental health literacy

Is there an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mental health literacy? Can we predict the extent of an individual’s knowledge about mental disorders based on how much money they make, how much education they’ve received, or how far up the career ladder they’ve climbed?

That is the question that Olaf von dem Knesebeck and colleagues attempted to answer in a paper published recently in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 

The authors interviewed 2,014 men and women, residents of two German cities Hamburg and Munich, using a telephone survey. The split is roughly 50/50 between men and women respondents and the mean age was 47.5. The authors presented each interviewee with two vignettes out of three (one on depression, one on schizophrenia, and one on eating disorders).

The gender in the depression and schizophrenia vignettes was varied 50/50 between male and female patients, but all vignettes about eating … Continue reading →