Twenty-six items of the original 27-item AMI questionnaire were used in the current study to measure public attitudes towards mental illness. The single item ‘most women who were once patients in a mental hospital can be trusted as babysitters’ was excluded due to its low loading (below 0.3) in a previous study . Items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from ‘1 = strongly agree’ to ‘5 = strongly disagree’. The original scale was proposed to cover 4 components: fear and exclusion of people with mental illness, understanding and tolerance of mental illness, integrating people with mental illness into the community, and causes of mental illness and the need for special service .