Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

298 DESEGREGATING SCHIZOPHRENIA• make presentations about stigma and schizophrenia to 10 per cent of the highschoolstudents in the district; and• achieve an improvement in knowledge of 20 per cent and a reduction of socialdistance (measured by a simple attitudes scale) of 10 per cent among studentswho hear the presentation.Based on goals and objectives like these, the action committee should establishsome key messages and choose the media that will be used to put them across. Inthe case of the teenage target group the messages might be, for example:• Mental illness does not equal violence.• No one is to blame for mental illness.• Watch your language. (Don’t use objectionable terms, like “nutcase,” whenreferring to someone with mental illness.)The media to be used in reaching high-school students could include a consumerspeakers’ bureau, a teachers’ guide, the website of the WPA campaign(www.openthedoors.com), an art competition for students to produce antistigmamaterials, posters in the schools and advertisements inside city buses commonlyused by teenagers.In fact, many sites in the WPA global anti-stigma campaign, including Boulder,Colorado, Calgary, Alberta, various sites in Egypt, and several centers inGermany, Austria and England, opted to target high-school students. Theyproved to be a popular target for a number of reasons: they are the nextgeneration of people with mental illness and those who will stigmatize them; theyare easily accessible to an educational campaign; and mental illness is not usuallyincluded in the high-school curriculum. The high-school interventions werefound to be effective. Pre- and post-testing revealed lasting improvements inknowledge and attitudes at many of these sites. 89A local anti-stigma campaign cannot run forever, but some more permanentstructures and partnerships can be developed. Examples from the WPA projectsites include:• a change in the high-school health curriculum to include mental illness;• the creation of a local media-watch group;• a change in institutional or health service policy, such as establishingemergency-room procedures for the proper evaluation and treatment of peoplewith mental illness; and• the formation of a consumer speakers’ bureau.A consumer speakers’ bureau can be highly effective in addressing school classes,police, organizations of businesspeople and so on. A study from Innsbruck inAustria demonstrated that when mental health professionals addressed high-schoolstudents they had no measurable effect on attitudes towards the mentally ill, but