Do anti-stigma trainings for doctors and nurses actually work?

Pooling 21 randomized controlled trials, educational anti-stigma programs modestly reduced healthcare workers' negative attitudes toward people with mental illness right after training (SMD = -0.38). Knowledge and willingness to be near patients did not improve, and the attitude gains were not maintained at follow-up.

Hospitals and universities run a lot of anti-stigma workshops, and this review asked whether they change anything. The authors searched five research databases through July 2025 and pulled together every randomized controlled trial that tested an educational program aimed at reducing mental health stigma among healthcare professionals or students in training. Nineteen reports covering 21 studies made the cut. Immediately after training, participants scored meaningfully lower on explicit negative attitudes toward people with mental illness, with a pooled effect size of -0.38 (a small-to-moderate difference). Practicing clinicians also reported stronger intentions to behave differently, though students did not. But the picture gets thinner from there. Mental health knowledge did not improve. Neither did 'social distance,' the measure of how comfortable someone is living or working near a person with mental illness. And where studies followed up weeks or months later, the early gains had faded. The honest limitation is one the authors flag themselves: using the GRADE system, the certainty of the evidence ranged from very low to moderate, the trials used inconsistent outcome measures, and most looked only at what people said on a questionnaire, not at how they actually treated patients.