Make it personal : commentary on the paper ‘Evaluation of a campaign to improve awareness and attitudes of young people towards mental health issues’ (Livingston et al., 2012)

The article by Livingston et al. (2012) reporting the evaluation of a campaign to improve awareness and attitudes of young people towards mental health issues makes some insightful points regarding the impact of media campaigns on the stigma of mental illness. The particular Canadian campaign evaluated featured a prominent male sports figure talking about mental health issues and used online social media to reach young people. The effectiveness of the campaign was shown to be limited to the proximal outcomes of increasing awareness and use of a mental health website, but did not impact the distal outcomes to improve attitudes toward people with mental illness. The authors acknowledge that these findings are consistent with Corrigan’s recent summary that such campaigns show evidence of penetration but little meaningful impact (Corrigan, 2012). Notably, this campaign used social media rather than traditional media, which would be expected to have a greater impact for young people, but the anticipated outcomes remained elusive. Livingston et al. make the points, however, that increased market penetration is a worthwhile outcome and that improving mental health literacy, rather than reducing stigma, should be the goal of such media campaigns.