The Universities’ Approach regarding the stigma of Students’ Mental Illness

Among the most critical problems in students’ community is stigma against mental diseases; this issue will probably cause refusing treatments and more isolation. It threatens the relationships between students and community as a whole. Negative consequences like violence, depression, suicide, harm-related behaviors and so on are related to this social problem. This study has tried to collect and analyze the mechanisms and models used by the world's leading universities by examining their programs. This descriptive-analytical study examines pre-existing documents with a content-analytical method. This practical study focuses on existing documents; these documents are published in the form of texts in websites of universities. The statistical population is all the programs and strategies that have been used in universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia in relation to the prevention and proper treatment of the stigma of mental health disorders. Based on this, about 127 related ideas were found and after refining them, 53 programs were finally selected. Findings showed that the main variables in the prevention and treatment of stigma of mental health disorders are awareness, behavior change, support network, student participation, mental health diagnosis solutions and software.