Indiana Consortium For Mental Health
Services Research
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

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Abstract

Reprint # 36: Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996: What is Mental Illness and Is It to be Feared?*

In the 1950s, the public defined mental illness in much narrower and more extreme terms than did psychiatry, and fearful and rejecting attitudes toward people with mental illnesses were common. Several indicators suggest that definitions of mental illness may have broadened and that rejection and nega­tive stereotypes may have decreased since that time. However, lack of compara­ble data over time prevents us from drawing firm conclusions on these questions. To address this problem, the Mental Health Module of the 1996 General Social Survey repeated a question regarding the meaning of mental illness that was first asked of a nationally representative sample in 1950. A comparison of 1950 and 1996 results shows that conceptions of mental illness have broadened some­what over this time period to include a greater proportion of non‑psychotic dis­orders, but that perceptions that mentally ill people are violent or frightening substantially increased, rather than decreased. This increase was limited to respondents who viewed mental illness in terms of psychosis. Among such respondents, the proportion who described a mentally ill person as being violent increased by nearly 2 112 times between 1950 and 1996. We discuss the possi­bility that there has been a real move toward acceptance of many forms of men­tal illness as something that can happen to one of "us," but that people with psy­chosis remain a "them " who are more feared than they were half a century ago.