Is Psychiatric Research Stigmatized? An Experimental Survey of the Public

Although decisional incapacity can be caused by various medical conditions, incapacity due to mental illness is often singled out for scrutiny in research ethics policy debates. We assessed whether there is a general discriminatory per-ception of mental illness research and, if so, aimed to char-acterize the nature of that perception. We conducted an experimental, randomized Internet survey of the general public. We recruited 3140 adults through a web-research survey panel, with oversampling of racial and ethnic minor-ities and the elderly. Willingness to allow medical versus mental illness research was compared by randomly assign-ing the respondents to 1 of 7 web-based experimental sce-narios depicting a subject being considered for research participation. Respondents were more willing to allow re-search with medically ill than the mentally ill subjects, even when ethically relevant factors were equal. This difference was mediated through the respondents ’ tendency to view mentally ill subjects as more decisionally incapable than medically ill subjects, even when they were told that the sub-jects portrayed were in fact competent. Discriminatory per-ception of mental illness research exists and is mediated by an outdated view of mental illness and decisional capacity. Policymakers and institutional review board members may need to guard against its influence in their deliberations. Key words: ethics/stigma/mental illness/schizophrenia/ research attitudes/decision-making capacit