Changing Healthcare Professionals’ Attitudes Towards Voice Hearers: An Education Intervention

Despite being a relative common experience, hearing voices remains highly stigmatised, with serious consequences. Numerous interventions have been developed to reduce stigma towards mental illness in general, however most have failed to include implicit measures of stigma, and these have yet to be applied to hearing voices. The current study examined the efficacy of an education intervention in changing the explicit and implicit stigma held by healthcare professionals (N = 59) towards voice hearers. Results indicated that the education intervention led to significant decreases in explicit but not implicit measures of stigma, though participants demonstrated relatively positive baseline implicit attitudes towards voice hearers. These findings suggest that education interventions could be one way of reducing stigma towards voice hearers. Further research is necessary to explore the impact of education interventions in samples with more negative baseline attitudes, such as early career professionals, students, and the general population.