Prospective

Wong Calian

Room 326C, Sino Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

39433461

calian@cuhk.edu.hk

Department of Psychology

Hong Kong

Winnie W. S. Mak

Room 354, Sino Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

39436577

wwsmak@psy.cuhk.edu.hk

Department of Psychology

Hong Kong

《説書人》與精神病污名

Yes

2016-04-05

Other

Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee

N/A

Behavior

To evaluate the effectiveness of online psychoeducation posts and online recovery story posts on stigma reduction and promotion of help seeking behavior, participants will be randomly assigned to three different groups, namely, control group, psychoeducation group and story group, and they were required to fill in a questionnaire at three time points (pre-intervention, post-intervention and 1 month after intervention). The interventions will last for four weeks, during which participants will be exposed to two posts every week in three separate Facebook groups, thus 8 posts will be published in total per group before post-intervention questionnaire is filled out by participants. Participants will then be required to fill in the follow-up questionnaire one month after the intervention ended.

In control group, participants read posts about interesting facts of Hong Kong. Each post consists of a short text and a graphic. Posts were published twice every week, topics of the posts included: records of snowing, street name, rock cavern development, Mark Six, coding system of HKID, teahouse, gangster films and public toilet.

In the psychoeducation group, participants read posts about factual information of mental health. Each post similarly contains a short text and a graphic. Posts were published twice every week, topics of the posts included: introduction to common mental illness, mental illness stigma, mental health services and help seeking. Each of the topics includes 2 posts.

In the story group, participants read posts about information of mental health incorporated in a story written by people in recovery of mental illness. Each post, like the other two groups, includes a short text (i.e. story) and a graphic. The name of the author will be presented at the end of each story. Posts in the story group corresponded to the posts in psychoeducation groups, thus sharing same theme each time. For example, when post about help seeking is published in psychoeducation group, the story post on the same day will share the same topic – help seeking.

The posts in the psychoeducation and story group are posts from the Facebook page of StoryTaler

2 Facebook posts per week

8 posts

4 weeks

Twice a week

Mental health psychoeducation and contact with people with mental illness are two key ways to reduce stigma against mental illness (Rüsch, Angermeyer & Corrigan, 2005; Yamaguchi, Mino & Uddin, 2011).

Education aims at diminishing stigmatization through providing people with the knowledge of different mental illnesses. The term, “mental health literacy”, was first introduced by Jorm et al (1997) and is defined as “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention (P.182)”. Mental health literacy consists of several components, including knowledge about specific disorders or different types of psychological distress, risk factors and causes, self-help interventions and professional help available, and attitudes which facilitate recognition and appropriate help-seeking and the knowledge of how to seek mental health information. Education is found to be effective in improving attitudes towards mental illness in adolescents (Watson et al., 2004) and in adults (Corrigan, Larson, Sells, Niessen, & Watson, 2007).

Contact, on the other hand, has been also found to be fundamental for stigma change. Research studies reveal that people from the majority who have met with minority group are less probable to stigmatize against the minority; it is also discovered that contact combining with education is by far the most promising way in reducing stigma (Corrigan, 2012; Griffiths, Carron‐Arthur, Parsons & Reid, 2014). As direct contact requires delivery of intervention from well- trained people with mental illness, it makes direct contact challenging to be implemented widely (Stuart, 2006). Researchers have then turned to investigate the effect of video contact to make contact more accessible. Contacts that are based on video or face-to-face are both found to be effective in reducing stigma against people with mental illness (Corrigan & Gelb, 2006).

2 Facebook posts per week

8 posts

4 weeks

Twice a week

Adults 18 or above

Able to read Chinese

Have constant access to a Facebook account

Have read the Facebook Page of StoryTaler

18

999

Both Male and Female

Randomized

Randomised into 3 different groups, namely the control, psychoeducation and recovery story group

Placebo

Open label

Parallel

3

The present study strives to examine the effectiveness of online mental health education and online personal contact through recovery stories on reducing stigma against people with mental illness and participants’ attitude of seeking professional psychological help.

No