• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.65 no.2
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• pp.313-334
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• 2013

A study aims to assess Korean mental health literacy and analyze the characteristics of vulnerable population. This study presented typical vignettes of schizophrenia, depression and alcoholism to 1,197 adults randomly. All respondents were asked for recognition of mental illness, beliefs about causes, professional help and self-help, stigma for receiving psychiatric treatment for the person described. The results showed that the recognition of mental health problem in a vignette was very poor and that personal causes were seen by public as more important than environmental and bio-genetic causes. When the public were asked about various professional therapies and self-help activities, psychotherapy was favored while other professional help were considered to be less helpful than self-help activities. Among professionals, psychiatrist were viewed as most helpful. We used cluster analysis to compare high mental health literacy group with low mental health literacy group(vulnerable population). Vulnerable population were found to be more aged and to live in county area. We proposed government initiated program for enhancing public mental health literacy.