A Study Of Stigma Of People With Schizophrenia And Relationships With Medication Compliance

Many studies in western countries had approved that stigma against people with schizophrenia was universal and stigma is a strong negative feature in the lives of people with schizophrenia. Some researchers thought that the stigma of mental illness will affect the compliance of medication. But, no report was found to describe the stigma and its consequence to compliance in China.Objective: To describe the status of stigma of people with schizophrenia and analyze the relationship between the stigma and medication compliance in China.Method: Convenient sampling was used to recruit 116 inpatients who were going well to discharge in a mental illness hospital in Beijing. Perceived Devaluation-Discrimination, Coping Orientations and Stigma-Related Feelings Scales were administered to assess the stigma of patients. The patients were surveyed by phone one and three months after discharge and were classified as fully compliance, partial compliance and non- compliance on the basis of self-reported.Results: (1) The mean of the perceived devaluation-discrimination scale is 2.52±0.31, not significant higher than the 2.50 midpoint. But depending on the specific items, the results showed that most participants endorsed that psychiatric patients will face rejection in marriage and getting a job ways. The means of five coping dimensions were significant higher than the 2.50 midpoint and the use of challenging was the most frequently endorsed way of coping with stigma (2.83±0.40). The majority of study participants felt that people are unable to understand their situation (2.74±0.39). The only dimension with a mean lower than the midpoint was the stigma-related feelings of different and ashamed (2.37±0.45). (2) Patients' education level, diagnosis type, area of residence and income of family were the influencing factors of stigma, but these factors affected the stigma of patients slightly. (3) Lower medication compliance was associated with the feeling of patients of understood by others (r=-0.216, P<0.05). But study found that stigma was not a predictor of the compliance to antipsychotic drug therapy according to Logistic regression analyses.Conclusion: People with schizophrenia frequently suffer from stigma. Otherwise, medication compliance of schizophrenic patients was not predicted by stigma in this study. Defining the relationship between stigma and compliance is still needed.