Stigma research focused upon other health conditions, such as mental illness and HIV/AIDS, indicates that the effects of education interventions will be enhanced by adding contact-based approaches that facilitate interaction between the public and people who live with stigmatized health conditions. In line with this research, results across several studies included in this review indicated that programs focused on educating medical students about substance use problems and exposing them to people with substance use disorders are likely to decrease their stigmatizing attitudes and increase comfort levels towards working with this population [5,6,15,72,73]. Similarly, interventions that target police officers and substance use counselors have demonstrated positive effects on stigma-related outcomes pertaining to substance use disorders. Furthermore, there is a growing body of research suggesting that interventions can maximize their effectiveness by targeting implicit-automatic processes underlying stigma (e.g. subconscious biases) [74,75]. As such, it would be prudent to integrate this knowledge into anti-stigma interventions.
