Age differences in mental health literacy

Background: The community's knowledge and beliefs about mental health problems, their risk factors, treatments and sources of help may vary as a function of age. Methods: Data were taken from an epidemiological survey conducted during 2003–2004 with a national clustered sample of Australian adults aged 18 years and over. Following the presentation of a vignette describing depression (n = 1001) or schizophrenia (n = 997), respondents were asked a series of questions relating to their knowledge and recognition of the disorder, beliefs about the helpfulness of treating professionals and medical, psychological and lifestyle treatments, and likely causes. Results: Participant age was coded into five categories and cross-tabulated with mental health literacy variables. Comparisons between age groups revealed that although older adults (70+ years) were poorer than younger age groups at correctly recognising depression and schizophrenia, young adults (18–24 years) were more likely to misidentify schizophrenia as depression. Differences were also observed between younger and older age groups in terms of beliefs about the helpfulness of certain treating professionals and medical and lifestyle treatments for depression and schizophrenia, and older respondents were more likely to believe that schizophrenia could be caused by character weakness. Conclusion: Differences in mental health literacy across the adult lifespan suggest that more specific, age appropriate messages about mental health are required for younger and older age groups. The tendency for young adults to 'over-identify' depression signals the need for awareness campaigns to focus on differentiation between mental disorders. Background It is now well recognised that up to 70% of individuals with mental health disorders do not seek help. It has been argued that help seeking will improve with better recognition and labelling of mental disorders, increased understanding of the causes and treatments for mental health problems [1], reductions in stigma [2] and confidence and belief in the rationale for treatment approaches [3]. The advantages of early help seeking have been clearly articulated, with early help seeking providing the opportunity for early intervention and improved long-term outcomes for mental disorders [4]. While mental health Published: 20 April 2008 BMC Public Health 2008, 8:125 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-8-125 Received: 11 September 2007 Accepted: 20 April 2008 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/125 © 2008 Farrer et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.