During the past few decades, there has been an increase in mental health literacy among the general public, especially regarding knowledge of the biological and genetic basis of mental illness [3, 10]. However, such increases have not lessened the stigmatization and discrimination towards people with mental illness . As a cluster of negative attitudes and beliefs, stigma is a concept which has received a lot of research attention [5, 7, 11]. Although there are different tools that can measure stigma [12, 13], public attitude is a much broader issue than these negative attitudes. Other attitudes like tolerance  and acceptance  are also part of it. Thus there is a need for multidimensional attitudes scales for assessing public attitudes to mental illness. The Attitudes to Mental Illness (AMI) questionnaire is a tool developed by the UK Department of Health, adapted from the 40-item Community Attitudes toward the Mentally Ill Scale . As a multidimensional instrument, it covers four aspects of public attitudes, namely 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 . The UK Department of Health has used it to assess public attitudes among the UK general population for more than 20 years , and it showed good internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.87 ). Another 2-factor structure was also identified, which included ‘prejudice and exclusion’ (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.83), and ‘tolerance and support for community care’ (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.77) . Given that these were based on the UK general population, it is therefore unknown whether these two different factor structures are applicable to the multi-ethnic population in Singapore.