Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Maastricht University
Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK
Maastricht University and Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK
Correspondence: Professor Jim van Os, Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 43 387 5443; fax: +31 43 387 5444; e-mail: j.vanos{at}sp.unimaas.nl
Declaration of interest This research was supported by the Dutch Ministry of Health.
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ABSTRACT |
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Aims To test whether perceived discrimination is associated longitudinally with onset of psychosis.
Method A 3-year prospective study of cohorts with no history of psychosis and differential rates of reported discrimination on the basis of age, gender, disability, appearance, skin colour or ethnicity and sexual orientation was conducted in the Dutch general population (n=4076). The main outcome was onset of psychotic symptoms (delusions and hallucinations).
Results The rate of delusional ideation was 0.5% (n=19) in those who did not report discrimination, 0.9% (n=4) in those who reported discrimination in one domain, and 2.7% (n=3) in those who reported discrimination in more than one domain (exact P=0.027). This association remained after adjustment for possible confounders. No association was found between baseline discrimination and onset of hallucinatory experiences.
Conclusions Perceived discrimination may induce delusional ideation and thus contribute to the high observed rates of psychotic disorder in exposed minority populations.
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INTRODUCTION |
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Our hypothesis was that people who reported that they had been the subject of perceived discrimination would be more likely subsequently to develop psychotic symptoms, regardless of their ethnic origin. We tested this hypothesis using data from a longitudinal, random population sample of 7076 individuals interviewed for the presence of psychotic symptoms.
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METHOD |
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A total of 7076 participants were enlisted at baseline. The response rate was 69.7%. No difference in psychiatric morbidity based on the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12; Goldberg, 1978) was found between responders and non-responders. At T1, 5618 persons participated; this reduced to 4848 at T2.
Risk-set
We were interested in whether perceived discrimination at baseline was
associated with psychotic symptoms at 3-year follow-up. Because of this, we
restricted our sample to those individuals who at baseline had a lifetime
rating of no psychotic symptoms (or psychosis-like experiences) on all the
individual items of a psychosis screening interview and had been interviewed
for the presence of psychotic symptoms at T2. This was
done for three reasons. First, this skewed the sample towards individuals with
true first-ever occurrence of psychotic experiences at T2.
Second, it decreased bias due to the influence of baseline psychotic or
psychosis-like symptoms on the reporting of discrimination (for example,
individuals with paranoid symptoms may perceive, and report, more
discrimination). Finally, it reduced the possibility of reversed causality,
i.e. strange individuals with psychosis-like symptoms being the
subject of discrimination. Our risk-set included 5838 persons at baseline. Of
these, 4067 (70%) were interviewed at T2.
Instruments
The participants were interviewed at home with the Composite International
Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), version 1.1
(Smeets & Dingemans, 1993) at baseline, T1 and T2. The CIDI
generates DSMIIIR diagnoses
(American Psychiatric Association,
1987) and is designed for trained interviewers who are not
clinicians. Interviewers read out questions in a standardised way and record
respondents' answers, making the CIDI essentially a self-report instrument.
The CIDI psychosis section consists of 17 core psychosis items (G1-G13, G15,
G16, G20 and G21). These psychosis items correspond to classic psychotic
symptoms, including persecution, thought interference, auditory hallucinations
and passivity phenomena. Both clinically relevant stressful psychotic
experiences and subclinical psychosis-like experiences are rated by the CIDI
(van Os et al, 2000).
For example, the experience of sometimes hearing a friendly voice in the
absence of any secondary delusional ideation would be rated as a non-clinical
psychosis-like experience, whereas the experience of hostile voices for which
the person was seeking help because of distress would be rated as a clinical
symptom. Personality tests completed at baseline were the Rosenberg
Self-Esteem Scale, a ten-item, four-point Likert scale yielding a global
self-esteem score (Rosenberg,
1965), the 14-item Groningen Neuroticism Scale
(Ormel, 1980) and a five-item
mastery scale indicating locus of control
(Pearlin & Schooler,
1978).
Final assessment of incident psychotic symptoms
As psychotic symptoms may be difficult to diagnose by lay interviewers,
further clinical interviews, guided by the findings of the CIDI interview on
psychotic symptoms, were conducted over the telephone by an experienced
clinician (psychiatrist, senior psychiatric trainee or psychologist) with all
individuals who had evidence of psychosis on any of the CIDI psychosis items
at T2 (Krabbendam
et al, 2002). The proportion of eligible individuals at
T2 who were successfully reinterviewed by the clinician
was 74.4%.
The T2 diagnosis of psychotic symptoms by clinicians at telephone interview was made using the three items of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS): unusual thought content, hallucinations and conceptual disorganisation (Overall & Gorham, 1962). Each symptom was scored on a range from 1 (absent) to 7 (very severe). The BPRS items unusual thought content and hallucinations represent the positive symptoms for psychosis. Delusional ideation was defined as a rating greater than 1 for the BPRS unusual thought content item; presence of hallucinations as a rating greater than 1 for the BPRS item hallucinations.
Perceived discrimination
At the baseline interview, participants were asked if they had experienced
discrimination over the past year because of their skin colour or ethnicity;
gender; age; appearance; disability; or sexual orientation. Participants
answered yes or no to each of the six
questions.
Statistical analysis
The rate of onset of delusional ideation was tabulated as a function of
level of baseline perceived discrimination and statistically evaluated using
Fisher's exact test. Adjustment for confounders was made using logistic
regression in the STATA statistical program
(StataCorp, 2001), yielding
odds ratios. Perceived discrimination score was analysed as a three-level
variable: 0, no discrimination (86%); 1, reported discrimination in one domain
(11%); 2, reported discrimination in more than one domain (3%).
The following confounders of the association between perceived discrimination and psychosis were selected a priori, guided by the literature: gender, age (five groups), urbanicity of place of residence (three levels), level of education (four levels), unemployment, single marital status and presence of any baseline CIDI-generated DSMIIIR diagnosis. Level of education, unemployment and single marital status are risk factors for psychotic illness that could arguably also be associated with higher rates of discrimination from others (i.e. reversed causality). Because psychotic illness may be preceded by non-psychotic illness and there are increased rates of discrimination in people with any mental health problems, we adjusted for the presence of any DSMIIIR diagnosis at baseline and, to increase sensitivity, for the presence of CIDI depressive symptoms E1 (persistent low mood over a period of 2 weeks) and E2 (persistent low mood over a period of 2 years). In order to take into account the effect of personality traits that might facilitate reporting of discrimination or the development of paranoid attributions, we also corrected for baseline self-esteem, neuroticism and locus of control.
The NEMESIS study had no precise measures of ethnicity and, as explained above, those who could not speak Dutch fluently were excluded. Country of birth was used as proxy of minority status, defined dichotomously as 0, born in The Netherlands, and 1, other. However, as none of the 213 individuals born outside The Netherlands had BPRS presence of hallucinations and only one had evidence of BPRS delusional ideation, the proxy measure of minority status was not adjusted for in the analyses.
Missing data sensitivity analyses
As not all of the eligible participants at T2 who had
displayed evidence of psychosis were interviewed again (the clinical
re-interview rate at T2 was 74.4%, as described above), we
conducted analyses to examine whether differential attrition could have biased
any findings. This was done by multiple imputation of missing values of
perceived discrimination at baseline (n=4 missing) and BPRS
delusional ideation and hallucinatory experiences at T2
(n=1793 missing) using the HOTDECK command in STATA. The HOTDECK
procedure is used several times within a multiple imputation sequence since
missing data are imputed stochastically rather than deterministically. One
thousand imputation sequences were run, yielding 1000 data-sets in which the
average logistic regression effect size of perceived discrimination on
delusional ideation and hallucinatory experience was estimated within the
HOTDECK procedure. Imputation of missing values was stratified by the
following important determinants: age, gender, urbanicity, unemployment,
country of birth, single marital status, any DSMIIIR baseline
diagnosis, and level of education.
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RESULTS |
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Multiple imputation of both baseline discrimination and follow-up delusional ideation and hallucinatory experience revealed a similar effect of perceived discrimination at baseline on delusional ideation at follow-up (OR=1.9, 95% CI 1.1-3.4), and no effect on hallucinatory experiences (OR=1.2, 95% CI 0.5-2.9).
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DISCUSSION |
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Study limitations
There are several methodological limitations. First, there were no suitable
measures of ethnicity, and only individuals with sufficient proficiency in
Dutch were included. This selection might have led to exclusion of members of
minority groups with the lowest levels of acculturation and, possibly, with
discrimination.
It could be argued that our findings may represent residual confounding by
ethnic group (being exposed to more discrimination and having higher rates of
psychosis). However, even when we restricted the sample to individuals who
were born in The Netherlands and whose father and mother had both been born in
The Netherlands (thus effectively excluding current immigrant groups living in
The Netherlands), the effect size of perceived discrimination on delusional
ideation was not reduced (OR=2.0, 95% CI 1.0-4.0). Another test of this
possible bias is to exclude reported discrimination on the basis of skin
colour from the discrimination measure in the logistic regression. Excluding
these individuals increased rather than decreased the adjusted OR (OR=2.5, 95%
CI 1.3-4.8), again indicating that this bias was not operating. These
limitations, therefore, should not undermine the main finding reported in this
study that perceived discrimination at baseline is associated with onset of
delusional ideation.
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Second, as in all longitudinal population surveys, there was substantial attrition between baseline and T2. However, detailed analyses of attrition in this sample suggest that attrition was largely random as far as baseline psychopathology is concerned (de Graaf et al, 2000), justifying our method of multiple imputation as a means to conduct sensitivity analyses. Post hoc analyses with the main exposure in this study perceived discrimination confirmed the randomness of missing values: the mean baseline discrimination score in those who were interviewed at T2 was 0.17, s.d. 0.48 (n=4067; proportion who reported discrimination at baseline in at least one domain 13.4%), and in those who were not interviewed 0.17, s.d. 0.48 (n=1767; proportion who reported discrimination in at least one domain 13.4% rounded figures coincidentally are similar).
Third, the measurement of perceived discrimination was not refined. Respondents were unable to report the frequency and degree of perceived discrimination, whether this was day-to-day minor incidents or major life-altering incidents or assaults. In addition, our measure of perceived discrimination was broad and included a whole range of discriminatory perceptions, including gender and age. However, previous work has suggested that mental health variables are sensitive to perceived discrimination, regardless of type of discrimination (age, gender, racial, etc.) (Kessler et al, 1999).
Fourth, the statistical resolution of the study was limited, with only 26 cases of onset of broadly defined delusional ideation, in 7 of which some degree of discrimination was reported at baseline. The effect of perceived discrimination was nevertheless statistically precise, and was present after stringent exclusion of all individuals who at baseline had evidence of any level of psychotic experiences that could have interfered with subjective report of discrimination. It is therefore unlikely that the association between perceived discrimination and psychosis was biased by psychosis-prone or psychosis-prodromal individuals reporting more discrimination.
In order to exclude the possibility of reversed causality (premorbid social and cognitive deficits associated with psychotic illness giving rise to discrimination), we adjusted for employment status, marital status and level of education, three variables that have been shown to be sensitive indicators of premorbid deficits in psychotic illness (van Os et al, 1995). Adjustment did not reduce the discrimination parameter and even increased it, making it unlikely that the effect of perceived discrimination is confounded to a large degree by premorbid social competence. Similarly, adjustment for non-psychotic diagnoses and symptoms as possible precursors of later psychotic illness also did not affect the results, nor did adjustment for possible confounding measures of personality.
Possible mechanisms
Previous work has shown associations between perceived racial and
non-racial discrimination and non-psychotic poor mental health
(Kessler et al, 1999;
Mays & Cochran, 2001). A
cross-sectional national study in the UK has demonstrated an association
between perceived discrimination and the rate of psychotic and non-psychotic
mental illness in non-White ethnic minority groups
(Karlsen & Nazroo, 2002).
Our study is, as far as we are aware, the first study to provide prospective
evidence of a link between perceived discrimination and delusional ideation,
suggestive of a causal link.
There is growing evidence that cognitive attributions play a part in the onset of psychotic symptoms such as delusions (Bentall et al, 2001). Chronic experience of discrimination may have effects on attributions of daily events (Gilvarry et al, 1999), thus facilitating an understandably paranoid attributional style (Sharpley & Peters, 1999). Such effects may be particularly important over a life course, thus forming a plausible explanation for the high observed rates in second-generation immigrants. Perceived discrimination (the exposure used in this study) does not have to be proved to reflect identifiable acts of discrimination. For the argument by which cognitive mechanisms result in psychosis this may not be relevant, as subjective perception of discrimination alone is the prerequisite for the development of a paranoid attributional style. As explained above, it is unlikely that our measure of discrimination was merely a measure of paranoid personality, as all individuals with any level of paranoid ideation at baseline (CIDI has four items measuring paranoid symptoms, G1, G2, G3 and G4, which are sensitive to picking up paranoid ideation; van Os et al, 2000) were excluded from the study.
Discrimination and contextual effects
If discrimination has a role in the onset of psychosis, it is likely to be
modified by a range of contextual factors. Studies within the African American
population show that the amount of discrimination that they encounter depends
on how dark their skin is (Williams,
1999) and that more US non-Hispanic Blacks report often
encountering day-to-day discrimination than do non- Hispanic Whites, with
other ethnic groups in between the two
(Kessler et al,
1999). The impact of perceived discrimination on the risk of
hypertension in African Americans depends on their social class and coping
style. Ignoring discrimination raises the risk of hypertension in high-income
African Americans but lowers the risk in those with low incomes
(Krieger & Sidney, 1997). Mortality rates in US states have been shown to be associated with the degree
to which Whites disrespect Blacks. Although the effect on Blacks was alarming
and significant, there was also a demonstrable effect on Whites. High rates of
racial disrespect in an area are thus associated with lower life expectancy
for Whites and Blacks (Kennedy et
al, 1997). Further work should attempt to take into account
such contextual effects.
Discrimination, ethnic group and psychosis
This study focused on the possible effect of perceived discrimination on
the onset of delusional ideation, regardless of ethnic group, but could not
establish to what degree the reported associations between minority ethnic
group, psychotic disorder and psychotic symptoms are actually confounded by
perceived discrimination. There is nevertheless validity to this supposition.
First, the increase in the rate of psychotic illness in ethnic minority groups
is not static: in electoral wards it has been shown to be related to the
proportion of the ward population that are from ethnic minority groups. The
incidence rate is lower when the proportion of the population from ethnic
minorities is higher. These data are thought to reflect decreased exposure to,
or increased protection from, racial discrimination in areas with relatively
high proportions of ethnic minorities
(Boydell et al, 2001).
Second, it has been shown, albeit in a study of non-psychotic mental illness,
that it was perceived discrimination itself and not ethnic group that was
associated with poor mental health
(Kessler et al,
1999). Third, the psychosis outcome in this study, delusional
ideation, has been shown to be more prevalent in AfricanCaribbean
people living in the UK (Sharpley &
Peters, 1999), and it is a known risk factor for more severe
psychotic states (Poulton et al,
2000). On the other hand, it is unlikely that discrimination is
the sole factor contributing to the observed excess risk in ethnic minority
groups. Higher rates of isolated hallucinations have also been reported in
ethnic minority groups (Johns et
al, 2002), but the results of the current study failed to
find an effect of discrimination on hallucinatory experiences.
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Clinical Implications and Limitations |
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LIMITATIONS
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Received for publication February 20, 2002. Revision received July 23, 2002. Accepted for publication September 4, 2002.
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