Disclosing Mental Illness to Share or Test Stigma? Disclosure Motivations and Disclosure Directness

Satisfying disclosures for people with mental illness can reduce health disparities by improving access to valuable social and informational support. In an experimental and correlational study (Total N = 364), the present work documented relationships between two commonly cited disclosure motivations and disclosure directness, or the degree to which one explicitly discusses their stigma during a disclosure experience, because disclosure directness has been documented as a new predictor of satisfying disclosures. Using a sample of Americans living with mental illness, experimental findings (Study 1) highlight that participants with stigma-sharing motivations, or those which focus on sharing one’s stigma and related experiences with the disclosure recipient, utilized more direct disclosures, relative to participants with stigma-testing motivations, or those that focus on figuring out the recipient’s attitude toward one’s mental illness. Structural equation modeling in Study 2 suggested that stigma-testing motivations were associated with more negative disclosure experiences through reducing disclosure directness, while stigma-sharing motivations produced the opposite pattern of results. Moreover, Study 2 suggested that disclosure motivations can have downstream effects on perceptions of public stigma and psychological distress symptoms through an indirect effect on disclosure directness and satisfaction. Together, this work reviews the significance of documenting disclosure motivations and disclosure directness in disclosure research and highlights the potential benefit of reframing disclosure motivations to impact the positivity of disclosure experiences for people living with concealable stigmas.