Attitudes Toward Mental Illness: the Construction of the Libertarian Mental Health Ideology Scale

The present study was an attempt to construct an attitude scale to measure the radical psychosocial or libertarian position about "mental illness" and mental health practices. Scale items received high ratings for descriptiveness of the libertarian mental health ideology. A preliminary questionnaire was then submitted to mental health respondents and results showed that each finally selected scale item ( a) distinguished significantly between extreme scorers on a dimension of strength of identification with a "Szaszian- libertarian" posi tion ; and (b) loaded at a .4 level or higher on factors derived in a principal components factor analysis. The factor analysis defined four scale factors: Mental Illness Mythology (MIM), Anti-Medical Model (AMM), Social De viance Control (SDC), and Anti-Coercive Treatment (ACT). Scale factor and total scores were predictably related to self-reports of psychiatric orientation and endorsement of a libertarian position in making judgments about case materials. Scale reliability data, item-total correlations, and inter-factor and factor-total correlations supported the general utility of the total score as a representative libertarian measure.