Psychiatric labels in the military setting : Some consequences on other people's causality attribution of personal and situational factors

• About eight percent of all male Swedish eighteen-year-olds are exempted from military service on a psychiatric basis annually. From the perspective of the labelling theory of mental illness, the aim of this paper was to study some consequences on other people's perception of individuals who have been exempted on this basis. An experiment was performed with two different groups of subjects; 81 conscripts and 61 students of personnel administration. The subjects were to listen to a tape-recorded description of a car accident and to evaluate its causes. A brief description of the life history of the driver was given which included a “label”. It was foud that with a psychiatric exemption label the accident was attribuited significantly more to factors internal to the driver than to external factors, as compared to a general problems-living label.

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