Lay Expectations of Mental Disorder: A Test of the Folk Psychiatry Model

Abstract

A new theoretical account of laypeople's explanations of mental disorders-the folk psychiatry model-was tested in a study of 71 undergraduates. The study examined whether the explanatory modes that participants used to account for specific disorders conformed to the model's predictions, and whether these modes predicted individual differences in stigmatizing. Participants gave free explanations for 3 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) mental disorders, a medical disease, and a form of social deviance, and rated these conditions on attributional and social distance measures. The extent to which participants provided cause-, reason-, and causal-history-based explanations (Malle, 1999) for the 5 conditions was coded. Different explanatory modes were employed for different conditions consistent with the folk psychiatry model's predictions, and these modes predicted stigmatizing independently of the attributional dimensions. The model appears to represent a promising new approach to lay thinking about mental disorder.