Mental health literacy: A cross-cultural study from Britain, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Background: A cross-cultural study was conducted on the identification of psychiatric problems comparing British, Hong Kong and Malaysian participants.

Objective: To investigate the ability to correctly identify different psychiatric problems and recommend strategies for treatment.

Methods: A total of 440 participants were shown vignettes of schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), social phobia, depression, bipolar disorder, stress, child attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), child depression and child "daily troubles". In each they were asked to say what they thought the person's problem was and how they could be helped as well as give their confidence ratings on both judgments.

Results: The British were the most adept at correctly identifying the cases of mental disorders in the vignettes followed by the Hong Kong Chinese and Malaysians. Overall, the depression cases were the best identified and social phobia was the least identified. In terms of help recommendation, a higher percentage of British participants endorsed professional help as useful for the person in the vignette compared to Hong Kong and Malaysian participants.

Conclusions: The findings were discussed along with suggestions on how to improve mental health literacy. The ethnocentric nature of applying Western concepts in the East was acknowledged.