The Minding Your Mind Speaker Program is conducted at middle schools and high schools throughout the greater Philadelphia region and beyond. Minding Your Mind’s Speaker Program features young adults who have mental health conditions talking to students about their experiences with mental illness in a way that challenges negative stereotypes about people with mental health conditions. The Speaker Program is an evidence-based contact strategy to reduce stigmatized attitudes about people living with mental illness. Many research studies show that contact strategies are the most effective way to improve attitudes about those with mental health conditions. Statistical analysis of the Speaker Program shows that the program is improving students’ attitudes about people with mental illness. These improvements demonstrate that Minding Your Mind’s Speaker Program is an effective stigma-reduction program, and one of the few in the country that has the data to prove it.

Results
When measuring statistical significance, something called a p-value shows whether or not the result is statistically significant. The threshold for statistically significant P-values can be set at different levels, but usually .05 is selected. When this is the threshold, any p-value below .05 is considered statistically significant. In this case, the p-value is measuring whether the differences between the students’ pretest and posttest scores are statistically significant. As the results show, the p-values for five of the categories were below the threshold of .05. In plain language, this suggests that the Speaker Program is indeed improving students’ attitudes about people with mental illness. Specifically, they are less likely to think students with mental illness are dangerous, less likely to be afraid, less likely to think students with mental health issues should be in different classes, less likely to be angry with students with mental illness, and less likely to avoid them socially. To learn more about the study and to view the survey used click here.