STIGMATIZING ATTITUDES TOWARDS INDIVIDUALS WITH MENTAL ILLNESS IN HONG KONG: IMPLICATIONS FOR THEIR RECOVERY Hector W.H. Tsang and Phidias K.C. Tam The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Fong Chan University of Wisconsin–Madison W.M. Cheung University of Hong Kong  The literature suggests that stigmatizing attitudes in the community will affect lives and recovery of people with mental illness. This is particularly serious and obvious in Chinese societies where mental illness is often associated with shame and stigma. As Hong Kong and China have undergone rapid changes in terms of social and economic development, this study aimed at providing the most up-to-date empirical information regarding mental illness stigma and its impact on individuals with mental illness. A 31-item Questionnaire on Mental Illness was developed to measure public attitudes towards mental illness, with special reference to issues that affected the burden on family members of mental health consumers. The questionnaire together with the Level of Contact Sub-scale (Holmes et al., 1999) was distributed to primary and secondary students for their friends and relatives aged 16 or above to complete. A total of 1,007 validly completed questionnaires were returned constituting a response rate of 74%. An exploratory factor analysis identified eight factors which accounted for 50.6% of the total variance: hostility, aberrant, openness, resources, acceptance, rights, misgivings, and I would like to thank Dr. P. W. Corrigan for his advice in revising the manuscript leading to successful publication in the Journal of Community Psychology. Correspondence to: Hector W.H. Tsang, Associate Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong; e-mail: rshtsang@polyu.edu.hk ARTICLE JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 31, No. 4, 383–396 (2003) © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jcop.10055