Lifestyle Factors as Perceived Causes of Psychological Distress: Implications for Mental Health Stigma

<b>Purpose:</b> The current study aimed to understand how mental health stigma was affected by a person's causal beliefs about mental illness, specifically, believing that mental distress is caused by poor lifestyle choices. This study also examined whether a participant's own levels of healthy lifestyle behaviors moderated this relationship. These lifestyle factors included behaviors such as daily vegetable intake, physical activity, and sleep, along with substance use characteristics. <b>Major Findings:</b> The consistent finding across both samples was that believing that lifestyle behaviors predicted psychological distress was associated with greater pity towards those with mental illness. In the general adult sample, but not the undergraduate sample, lifestyle causal beliefs were also associated with greater anger and fear. There was some evidence that the degree to which a person followed their own healthy lifestyle behaviors (specifically their substance use) was associated with lower pity and greater anger, but only for those who reported using more substances themselves. <b>Conclusions:</b> The association of lifestyle causal beliefs with pity may be due to the known challenge of maintaining healthy lifestyles. These associations may be important to understand in the application of lifestyle medicine approaches to mental health and may provide targets for stigma reduction interventions.