Abstracts Social Work

Mental health causal beliefs, perception and attitude differences of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans

by Joanna Gutierrez

The study explored the differences in mental health attitudes, perceptions and causal beliefs between Mexican Americans born in the United States and Mexican immigrants born in Mexico through quantitative data gathered by the researcher. Primary data collected from fifty (50) participants was used to explore these differences via the Attitudes Towards Mental Health Problems Scale (ATMHPS) (Gilbert et al., 2007). According to mean scores on the ATMHPS, the Communtiy External Shame (CES) subscale - concern about how one???s community views mental illness and how it would view them personally if they suffered from a mental illness, was of highest concern regardless of nationality, sex, income and education. For this reason, the researcher focused on examining the relationship between nationality, sex, income and education with Community External Shame (CES). The major findings from the study indicated no statistically significant difference between U.S born Mexican Americans and Mexican born immigrants in their concerns for Community External Shame (CES) (t(48)= -.571, p= .571). Like nationality, the researcher did not find a statistically significant affect of sex ( t(48)= 1.29, p= 0.203), income ( t(48)= 1.05, p= 0.297) or education ( t(48)= 1.53, p= 0.133) on Community External Shame (CRS), suggesting that in this small sample of participants of Mexican descent, nationality, sex, income and education did not influence their stigmatic mental illness beliefs about community external shame.