Fine-Tuning Advertising Designed to Reduce the Stigma of Mental Illness

Abstract

Not-for-profit organizations, governments at various levels, and business-sponsored groups all have an interest in reducing the stigma of mental illnesses, and as many turn to advertising as a tool for doing so, they can benefit from a broad menu of approaches suggested by research in social psychology. For example, they can avoid “backlash” against ads that tell an audience what NOT to do by indicating that stigmatizing is out of step with one's self-image or out of step with one's peers, or by changing the associations stored in memory concerning mental illnesses.