The stigma associated with mental illness creates costly discrimination, further diminishes physical and mental health, and often creates delays in diagnosis- and treatment-seeking. Stereotype threat-the fear of being seen through the lens of a negative stereotype-creates additional costs in the forms of performance decrements, negative health outcomes, and harmful coping strategies. Unfortunately, as currently conceptualized, stereotype threat may have only limited application to individuals with mental illnesses. The proposed framework, which elaborates on current views by positing three qualitatively distinct stereotype threats, remedies this deficiency. Study 1 assesses predicted antecedent factors and outcome variables associated with each threat and begins to create and validate a scale of the predicted threats. Studies 2 and 3 assess the proposed causal links between the antecedent variables, each threat, and the outcome variables. These studies seek to clarify the experience of stereotype threat in people with mental illness in order to facilitate the translation of findings into effective strategies to reduce the burden of mental illness.
