Authors' reply

Professor Eagles writes to ask whether our conclusion from the paper is that the Scottish ‘see me’ anti-stigma campaign has positively influenced public attitudes about mental illness in Scotland. He suggests that this conclusion may be inappropriate because the populations in Scotland and England produce different sample sizes, given that the population of England is roughly ten times that of Scotland. We are very grateful to Professor Eagles for his comments as they allow us to provide some more information on these surveys than we could include in the original paper. ¹

As he rightly says, direct evidence of the position in Scotland vis-à-vis England is not provided by comparison of only those significant changes within the two sites. We had hoped to pursue this question further with analysis of future surveys, which would have given us power to make the comparisons between Scotland and England adequately, but unfortunately the wording of the Scottish survey has been changed so this will not be possible. The existing data-sets do, however, show limited evidence in favour of Scotland when comparing their respective mean changes from immediately pre- to post-campaign periods (2000 v. 2003). Of the 25 items, 6 differed between the sites at a nominal 0.1 significance level. One item (26: fear of downgrading residential areas) favoured England at P = 0.05. The others favoured Scotland: items 7–9 at P = 0.1 (to do with tolerance), and items 10 and 13 (the need to spend money and care for people with mental illness) at P = 0.05. As we stated in our paper, the evidence may be consistent with an early positive effect of ‘see me’, but this possible association requires further investigation, although we accept that it is far from conclusive and needs further verification.