A change of diagnostic name of schizophrenia can improve public’s perception and attitude toward it (in Chinese)
The debate about whether to change the Chinese diagnostic name of “Schizophrenia” has been widespread over recent years, increasing number of researchers and professionals are calling for a change of its diagnostic name. However, there is no solid evidence to support that a change of schizophrenia’s Chinese diagnostic name could ease public’s bias of this mental illness and its stigma issue. In this study, through an intervention technique, we designed a scale to measure the possible changes of participants’ perception and attitude in terms of different diagnostic names: JING SHEN FEN LIE ZHENG and SI JUE SHI TIAO ZHENG. The results showed that the scale demonstrated a high reliability (α = 0.882; α = 0.859 in two tests) and there was a moderate correlation between the dimension of perception and attitude (Pearson’s R = 0.668; Pearson’s R = 0.677 in two tests). A further analysis revealed that the new diagnostic name was able to significantly reduce the negative perception of schizophrenia (p < .001) and significantly improve participants’ attitude toward this mental illness. Our findings provide evidence to support the change of diagnostic name of schizophrenia in China for the first time. We also firstly create a new quantitative way to measure the effect of name change of schizophrenia, providing a tool for future research in this area.