UC Riverside

Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NHPI) rarely seek mental health treatment for reasons that are minimally understood. To assess the mental illness stigma context in NHPI communities that may be contributing to low help-seeking, this study collected novel stigma data from two large U.S. NHPI communities from October 2017 to January 2018, then compared this data to national stigma data from the U.S. public. Survey data were collected from 222 community-dwelling NHPI participants recruited by research-trained NHPI staff. Surveys incorporated well-established vignettes describing persons with major depression and schizophrenia. Study data were compared to U.S. general public data from the 2006 General Social Survey: the largest U.S. stigma study. Compared to the U.S. public, NHPI participants reported greater stigma toward mental illness in ways likely to impede help-seeking including: (1) more frequently endorsing stigmatizing causal attributions of depression and schizophrenia, (2) less frequently perceiving disorders as serious, and (3) more commonly desiring social distance from persons with depression. Study data are the first to reveal the presence of a strongly stigmatizing context in NHPI communities likely to hinder NHPI help-seeking. Thus, culturally tailoring anti-stigma interventions to appropriately target NHPI mental health attitudes and beliefs may prove effective in promoting NHPI help-seeking.