Cookies notification

In accordance with the EU Cookie Directive we are informing you that we use cookies to track your usage of this website. To find out more about the cookies we use see our privacy statement.

 

I accept cookies from this site

Public stigma survey

In June 2012 we asked everyone to take part in our survey to find out more about people's attitudes to mental health.We regularly campaign to reduce mental health stigma and we hope that by improving attitudes we help to improve the lives of people who use our services.

Some of our key activities are:
• Our Love Arts Festival explores the links between creativity and mental health www.loveartsleeds.co.uk
• Our What's your Goal campaign raises awareness of connections between physical health and mental wellbeing www.whatsyourgoal.org.uk
• We part-fund a Time to Change project worker. Find out more on Facebook Time to Change Leeds

We're delighted that 328 people took part in the survey from across Leeds, York and surrounding areas, an increase in responses compared to last year's survey.

The results have been really interesting and we've put together a brief snapshot of what we found. 

Out of the 328 people that responded, 170 thought that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life, which is in-line with national research.

In July, Channel 4 ran a campaign called ‘4 Goes Mad' to highlight employment issues faced by those who have mental health issues. Our survey asked whether people with mental health problems should have the same rights to a job as anyone else and 233 people agreed strongly that they should.

When asked whether their place of work would support them if they became depressed, 39% felt strongly that they would receive their employers would support them.

In recent times, the media has been blamed for a poor portrayal of people with mental health difficulties and we wanted to find out whether the media influences the public's view. 253 people felt that the media does influence people's view a lot, with just eight respondents being of the opinion that it doesn't. Just under half of the people asked felt that the medias portrayal is not fair and work should be done to improve the representations.

We asked whether mental health stigma and discrimination has changed in the past year. Positively, 103 people felt it had decreased compared with 192 who thought it had not.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey. We will be sending out the 2013 survey later in the year.