RESEARCH Attitudes towards people h

differences in attitudes between professionalUSA Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleIntroduction Sigma and negative attitudes towards people with mental illness have been found to be common worldwide among both trained health professionals as well as the general population [1,2]. In China, mental illness not only re-fers to severe psychotic illness, but also contains more common disorders such as depressive disorders and anx-iety disorders etc. Some studies have found attitudes toward mental illness were more stigmatized in less devel-oped Asian and African cultures than in the West [3-5] but far less is known about differences in such atti-tudes between social groups within Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs) such as China. For example some studies have focused on attitudes within groups and fac-tors influencing such attitudes generally in China and Hong Kong [6,7] but no studies, to our knowledge, hav