Attitudes of medical students towards persons with mental disorders: A comparative study between Japan and Thailand

Abstract

This study was conducted at three universities, two in Japan and one in Thailand, in order to elucidate the effects of medical education, especially with regard to contact experience on medical students' attitudes toward persons with mental disorders. Questionnaires, which included the Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons Scale (ATDP) and the Contact with Disabled Persons Scale (CDP), were distributed to 1st year students prior to the commencement of their medicine/psychiatry studies and distributed to 6th (or 5th) year students who had completed their psychiatric curriculum. The ATDP scores were lower for 6th year students at all universities, suggesting that post-education students had a more unfavorable attitude than pre-education students. Thai students indicated more unfavorable attitudes than did the Japanese students. Three factors were extracted from the ATDP scale and termed: negation of character, negation of ability and affirmation of normality. Four factors from the CDP scale were extracted and labeled intimate contact experience, ordinary contact experience, unpleasant contact experience and pleasant contact experience. Greater negative attitudes of post-education students than pre-education students were thought to attribute mainly to an increase in factor score of negation of ability and this result was correlated with an increase in factor score of ordinary contact experience in post-education students. Of the three ATDP factor scores, the higher score of Thai students for negation of character contributed to their overall unfavorable attitude scores. The cross-national similarities and differences of students' attitudes towards and contact experience with mentally disordered persons were discussed from the viewpoint of medical education.

Professional Attitudes towards Mental Illness: Testing the Contact Hypothesis among Nurses of Ethnic Anglo and Chinese Australian Backgrounds

“…Similarly Anglo nurses appear to have had greater informal and 'competent-patient' exposure than Chinese nurses. It was originally thought that positive and negative encounters may also be a useful distinction in view of Yamamoto et al's (1996) [10] delineation of unpleasant contact), however, in our analysis positive and negative contact experience seem to be related to the same factor (Factor 1, Contact via Work Situation).…”

Internalized stigma and its psychosocial correlates in Korean patients with serious mental illness

“…Some studies further suggested that stigma in Asian culture is more severe than that in Western culture (Whaley, 1997;Lauber and Rössler, 2007), due to the group-centered nature which is common among Asian populations (Chong et al, 2007;Papadopoulos, 2009;Abdullah and Brown, 2011). In addition, the patterns of stigma vary throughout Asia (Yamamoto et al, 1996;Ng, 1997;Kurihara et al, 2000;Yamada et al, 2001;Chiu et al, 2005) and even between East Asian countries of similar cultures (Kumakura et al, 1992;Hanzawa et al, 2009).…”

Does Special Care Dentistry undergraduate teaching improve dental student attitudes towards people with disabilities?

“…increased optimism, higher levels of motivation, more time spent on planning and providing services) to serve persons with disabilities (6). Across health sciences, curricula have been developed to improve attitudes towards people with disabilities amongst healthcare trainees (10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16). Within dentistry, as in medicine, many educators have attempted to change student attitudes through undergraduate curricula (17).…”