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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0771

Public perceptions of mental illness in Romania

SOCIAL PERCEPTION OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN ROMANIA

Lower educational attainment and older age are associated with more negative perceptions; stigma varies by diagnosis, with alcohol dependence most strongly associated with stereotypes of violence and moral weakness, and schizophrenia with stereotypes of incompetence.

The aim was to examine how public perceptions of mental illness in Romania vary by educational attainment, age, and gender. An anonymous, cross-sectional online survey was conducted from March 1 to 20, 2023, with 126 participants (58.7% women, 50.8% with a bachelor's or master's degree, and 77.8% urban residents). The survey used the 20-item Public Perception Scale (alpha=0.83) and the 13-item Social Distance Scale (alpha=0.88), with 5-point Likert items and open-ended questions; data were analyzed in SPSS using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-tests. Regarding diagnosis-specific stigma, 69.8% perceived people with alcohol dependence as prone to physical violence, compared with 42.0% for schizophrenia and 13.5% for depression; 46.8% perceived people with schizophrenia as unable to make decisions or manage tasks, compared with 34.9% for alcohol dependence and 15.1% for depression; and 63.5% attributed alcohol dependence to weak willpower or character, compared with 21.4% for depression and 9.5% for schizophrenia. On the measure in which higher scores indicate more negative perceptions, mean scores by educational attainment were 3.92 for middle school, 2.79 for high school, and 2.37 for university graduates (n=6/56/64; F(2,123)=18.88; p<0.001). By age group, scores were 2.26 for ages 18–30, 2.49 for ages 31–45, 2.87 for ages 46–65, and 4.00 for those over 65 (n=16/66/40/4; F(3,122)=9.95; p=0.001). The gender difference was significant for overall perceptions (men 2.82; women 2.49; p=0.013), but not for the violence and social distance dimensions; thus, the hypothesis concerning gender was only partially supported. The authors identify online self-reporting, the predominantly urban sample, the small middle-school-educated and over-65 subgroups, potential social desirability bias, and the cross-sectional design as limitations.

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