Shame is a strong negative emotion of inadequacy, caused by failing to meet some standard (discussed in this page). Many people feel shame when they experience mental health problems, meaning that they feel they have failed to meet some standard. This type of shame is called "mental health shame".
You can see a negative spiral here: you are feeling bad (mental health problems), to which you feel bad (shame). Unsurprisingly, shame is related to many mental health problems. How to address shame is important to our mental health.
Assessing mental health shame is difficult. But the Attitudes Towards Mental Health Problems Scale (ATMHPS) has been used in many contexts and populations. To make it friendlier to users, we have developed the short version of this scale (SATMHPS). Here, we reduced the items from 35 to 14!
Those scales are useful, but both are written in English. So other language versions are needed. In Japan, for example, mental health shame is high (more details here). But there was no established scale about mental health shame in Japanese. So, we have validated the scale.
This paper has become available online today: "The development of the Japanese version of the full and short form of Attitudes Towards Mental Health Problems Scale (J-(S) ATMHPS)". We have validated the Japanese versions of the original scale and the shorter scale. We hope these scales will help better understand mental health shame in Japanese people.
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