Does MHFA reduce stigma?
This depends on how you define stigma. Many disease-model advocates define stigma as "making labels acceptable." Whereas a better definition is, "reducing prejudice and discrimination against people in distress." MHFA obviously chooses the first definition.
Specifically, MHFA used clinical vignettes to measure social distance, which means they gave a person a story about someone obviously in mental health crisis and said, "Would you want to hang out with this person, live next to them, hire them or marry them?" This type of research has a lot of weaknesses, but the biggest one is that really we should measure if someone is willing to hang out with/marry/employ someone NOT in crisis, maybe someone who recovered. (Am J Psychiatry 167:11, November 2010 p.1289) But more so, the number #1 and #2 sources of stigma are the disease labels and the mental health professionals. So why would re-inforcing a need for mental health labels and a need for mental health professional actually reduce stigma? It doesn't. There are scads of research articles, starting with this one, showing that disease label identification only increases stigma.
When you do research on stigma, the #1 most cited article, Pescolido et al, shows that saying "mental illness is a disease like any other," increases stigma. This article has over 190 citations. Lots of people have proven that identification with the disease model increases stigma. Mental Health First Aid's definition of stigma was more about "making labels acceptable," than about "making people who have distress acceptable." And if they labels are the problem, the they weren't reducing stigma. Most updated campaigns now define stigma as "discrimination and prejudice against people,"
