Schizophrenia is a major mental disorder of the brain that affects the way the patients perceive things and others in the society (Jorm & Oh, 2009). People in the society respond to patients suffering from schizophrenia by empathizing with them or showing the stigma towards them. The study wants to establish a relationship between the two reactions and determine how empathy affects stigma. The study also aims at establishing how stigma is affected by symptom severity. The study was in two sections. One was a non-experimental part examining the relationship between empathy and stigma and utilizing correlation analyses and the other was an experimental part that compared mean stigma scores from groups answering the severe and mild symptom severity questionnaires.
The study used data from a sample of eighteen male and 141 female psychology students from the Middlesex University ranging from 18 to 47 years. It utilized two scales with different vignettes collect information on mild symptoms and severe symptoms. The data was analyzed using SPSS statistics and correlation analyzes, as well as descriptive statistics, were computed. After an analysis using SPSS statistics, it was found that there was a non-significant negative correlation between stigma and empathy indicating that a change in either of the two variables did not affect the other variable. The means and descriptive statistics for empathy and stigma were also computed. The study also established that an increase in symptom severity increased stigma while at the same time reducing empathy towards schizophrenia patients.
Background
Among the many problems that face people living with schizophrenia, stigmatization by the society features prominently. Stigma refers to a set of depressing and often unfair believes that people have about schizophrenia that makes them treat the patients differently. Stigma more often than not is associated with fear that the patients may cause more harm than good. It affects both the patients and their families, but the patients suffer the most (Jorm & Oh, 2009). On the other hand, Schizophrenia is another leading cause of mental disorder whose causes remain unknown. The disease involves a complex set of disturbances of thinking and perception that affect social behavior. Empathy refers to the identification of oneself with an adverse situation that is affecting another individual. Empathy manifests itself in two ways; one is cognitive, and the other is emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to taking the point of view of another person. On the other hand, emotional empathy is experiencing emotions similar to the patient’s or being sensitive towards a patient’s reaction (Walter G. Stephan, & Kristina Finlay, 1999).
Discrimination is one of the ways through which stigma towards people with schizophrenia expresses itself. Discrimination refers to the social exclusion of the schizophrenia patients as a direct result of their condition (Sartorius and Schulze, 2008). According to Angermeyer et al. (2004), people suffering from schizophrenia find it hard to find jobs and are also discriminated against in trying to establish relationships. Most of these patients, therefore, opt to conceal their conditions, and this includes not taking medication. Subsequently, this significantly reduces their chances of recovery from the condition. There is evidence that suggests that patients with schizophrenia can adapt to the hostile social environment through a variety of methods such as refraining from interacting with others in the society. The trend, therefore, results in failure to get support from the empathetic individual and other support groups Ucok Alp et.al. (2013)
Furthermore, knowledge of how to deal with emergencies involving mental patients is not widely publicized, and, therefore, most people find it difficult to deal with such cases. A study conducted in Switzerland established that the majority of the participants were not aware of how to address mental disorders due to insufficient information (Brandli, 1999). To add on this, a majority of the public view these patients as being violent or prone to psychotic behavior. However, this is not true. A study conducted in the UK between 1997 and 2005 indicated that few of the patients were prone to violent episodes and even among those, the violence was usually towards oneself.
In most non-western cultures, such as is the case in Africa, the major source of stigma towards these mental patients is cultural beliefs. Most of these cultures believe that schizophrenia results from supernatural causes such as witchcraft, possession by evil spirits or curses from ancestors (Razali et al., 1996). In these cultures, the patients were discouraged to seek treatment from hospitals and instead, treatment was sought from traditional healers and through witchcraft.
Problem Statement
A study by Shuntaro Ando et.al (2011) established that while empathy towards patients suffering from induced hallucinations increased as the level of these hallucinations increased, participants were inclined to distance themselves more from such patients. Therefore, patients with severe symptoms received more empathy, but such patients still underwent discrimination. However, there has been little research conducted to determine a link between the level of symptom severity in schizophrenia patients and empathy/stigma. Could the findings of the study by Shuntaro et.al be replicated in the case of schizophrenia? How do empathy and stigma in respondents towards schizophrenia patients respond to symptom severity variations? The questions have opened a knowledge gap, and this research seeks to fill this gap. This study theorizes that empathy towards schizophrenia patients reduces as the patients become more severely symptomatic while stigma towards these patients increases as the patients become more severely symptomatic.
Objectives
General objective
To determine how empathy and stigma towards schizophrenia patients respond to variations in symptom severity.
Specific objectives
1. To determine whether the levels of stigma and empathy towards schizophrenia patients are affected by the symptom severity in the patients
2. To establish a relationship between stigma and empathy towards schizophrenia patients
Hypothesis
1. Stigma and empathy towards schizophrenia patients are affected by the level of symptom severity in the patients
2. There is a strong relationship between stigma and empathy towards schizophrenia patients.
DISCUSSION
A Pearson’s correlation established that there was a non-significant negative correlation between empathy and stigma, since a non-significant correlation showed no relationship between stigma and empathy. It was therefore demonstrated that it was possible for the degree of stigma towards a patient to vary while empathy towards the patients was not affected. Likewise, the degree of empathy shown towards a schizophrenia patient could be varied while stigma remained constant. For example, a respondent could experience a higher level of empathy towards a patient but still not opt not to interact with the patient because the level of stigma towards the patient has not varied. A change in either stigma or empathy did not induce a significant change in the other variable, that is, empathy and stigma respectively. The findings of this research therefore contrasted the findings of the study by Shuntaro Ando et.al (2011) in that no relationship could be established between stigma and empathy. The study by Shuntaro Ando et al. found that an increase in stigma will induce a decrease in sympathy towards these patients.
There was, therefore, a reverse relationship between the two variables which is in contrast to the findings of the current study. In his study, Shuntaro utilized the face to face interviews as well as questionnaires in data collection. The questionnaires were also administered individually to respondents who could explain the variations between the findings of his study and the current study. The results also disproved hypothesis number two that there was a strong relationship between stigma and empathy. These unexpected results could be attributed to a number of factors such as problems in data collection methods where the respondents were not exposed to enough stimuli to affect their responses such as videos of patients suffering from schizophrenia.
There were also problems with the sampling procedure used where it could not be established whether the respondents had previous interactions with schizophrenia patients or whether they were answering from hypothetical experiences. The lack of a significant relationship between the two variables could also be attributed to the homogeneity of the sample. The data came from a single location. However, most of the respondents were likely to give similar responses owing to exposure to the similar social interactions and conditions. Another issue that affected data was the responses of other respondents as the questionnaires were filled in the same room.
In the experimental part, comparison between means showed that the average for empathy was higher than the average score for stigma, but the stigma had a larger standard deviation than empathy. These statistics indicate that the respondents would typically experience stigma towards schizophrenia patients at a lower score than they would experience empathy. The patient is, therefore, more likely to experience a higher degree of stigma than empathy. The outcome, therefore, explain the findings of Ucok Alp et.al. (2013) who found that such patients could not get help from empathetic groups as a result of fear of perceived discrimination and stigma. However, the study by Ucok Alp et.al. (2013) utilized face to face interviews. The interviews were effective than the questionnaires utilized in the current study because the interviewer was able to read directly the emotions of the respondents. The research also utilized a larger sample size than the current study. A higher standard deviation from the mean in stigma shows that one experiences stigma is experienced over a larger spectrum of symptom severity than empathy. These findings, therefore, proved the study’s first hypothesis to be true that stigma and empathy towards schizophrenia patients are affected by the level of symptom severity in the patients.
Further studies should, however, be conducted in this field where the sampling procedure should be changed to random, and the sample should be taken from the entire population. A larger population will lead to a more inclusive sample. An alternative data collection method should be used, one that will take into account the emotional reactions of respondents to certain stimuli such as video and audio stimulation. Future studies should also take into account that schizophrenia is a disorder that occurs in stages, and therefore symptom severity also tends to vary within individual patients.
