Examining implicit and explicit attitudes toward psychotherapy versus medication

This project is Study 2 in a two-part study designed to investigate implicit and explicit beliefs about the effectiveness (vs. unhelpfulness) of therapy (vs. medication) in a large, diverse sample of individuals. Participants were adults who visited the Project Implicit Mental Health website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/pimh/index.jsp) between 7/5/16 and 5/15/19, and chose the Treatment IAT study labeled “Do you implicitly favor medication or talk therapy?” An exploratory analysis of data collected from participants between September 2011 and November 2015 (Study 1) was first conducted to evaluate the Treatment IAT, and to investigate whether therapy-as-effective implicit associations varied as a function of age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and mental health history. Based on these results, Study 2 aims to replicate Study 1’s findings in a more recent sample of visitors to Project Implicit Mental Health. In addition, several important changes to the mental health history questionnaire have been made to allow for a more nuanced and accurate evaluation of individuals’ mental health history. Specifically, in Study 1, participants had to choose whether they struggled with mental or emotional difficulties currently or in the past, and whether they received any help for mental or emotional difficulties currently or previously, without allowing them to select both current and previous options. In Study 2, these questions were modified to allow participants to choose previous, current, or both. This would capture, for instance, someone who is currently depressed and has also had prior episodes. Additionally, the mental health history questionnaire now asks whether an individual has struggled with specific mental health diagnoses (using a checklist of common diagnoses) rather than mental health or emotional difficulties broadly, and includes additional questions on the duration of mental health difficulties, and on the helpfulness of each mental health help-seeking experience. These changes were made to allow for a more thorough investigation of how implicit and explicit attitudes toward therapy and medication vary based on one’s mental health history. Thus, in addition to replicating findings from Study 1, Study 2 will test how implicit and explicit mental health treatment attitudes vary based on these new mental health history variables.