The Association Between Parent and Adult Child Severe Mental Illness

Mental illnesses affect many individuals and are subject to higher rates of stigmatization than physical illnesses (Robinson et al., 2019). Some research has begun to investigate how stigmatizing beliefs are formed, including learning beliefs from society as a whole about groups, or on a smaller scale such as the modeling of rejection by family members (Link et al., 1989; Bandura, 1977; Erzinger & Gruenfeld-Steiger, 2014) The current study investigates the association between current stigma held by adult children and perception of their parents’ stigmatizing beliefs during their childhood. Participants in this study completed questionnaires about their current beliefs about mental illness and perceptions of their parents’ beliefs and stigmatizing behaviors the parent engaged in during their childhood. The anticipated result of this study will be that participants who currently endorse more stigmatizing beliefs about mental illness will perceive that their parents are more highly stigmatizing of mental illness. Additional exploratory analyses examining parent avoidance of people with mental illness and conversations about mental illness will also be conducted