Community attitudes towards culture-influenced mental illness: scrupulosity vs. nonreligious OCD among orthodox jews

Abstract

Culture may particularly influence community attitudes towards mental illness, when the illness itself is shaped by a cultural context. To explore the influence of culture-specific, religious symptoms on Orthodox Jewish community attitudes, the authors compared the attitudes of 169 Orthodox Jews, who randomly viewed one of two vignettes describing either religious or nonreligious obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Results indicate that though participants were equally likely to perceive both vignettes as mental illness, they were less likely to endorse psychological/medical explanatory models and help-seeking, and conversely more likely to endorse social–religious explanations, religious help-seeking, and stigma in relation to religious OCD. Nevertheless, psychological/medical models and help-seeking were more strongly endorsed for both religious and nonreligious OCD. Beyond implications for Orthodox Jewish community actions, these findings suggest that attitudes towards mental illness may depend on how symptoms relate to community culture.