What Mental Illness Labels Mean to Schizophrenics
The aim of the study was to determine what the schizophrenic thinks about some of the labels applied to him: “crazy,” “insane,” “mental patient,” “person with something wrong with his nerves,” “schizophrenic,” “sick.” 68 schizophrenics rated a 15-scale semantic differential for each of these concepts and for the control concept, “person.” Ratings for each of the labels differed markedly from ratings for “person” on many of the 15 scales, especially those scales representing the evaluation factor. While there were minor differences in order from scale to scale, in general “mental patient” and “schizophrenic” were rated about the same and closer to “person” than were the other scales: “crazy” and “insane” were most dissimilar to “person;” and “sick” was unexpectedly in the middle. Ratings for the various labels were not significantly affected by severity of schizophrenia (as indicated by symptom checklist scores) or by the relative frequency of negatively-toned self-descriptions on an adjective checklist.