The Influence of Causal Explanations and Diagnostic Labeling on Psychology Students’ Beliefs About Treatments, Prognosis, Dangerousness and Unpredictability in Schizophrenia

The Opinions of Italian Psychology Students About People Diagnosed with Depression and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study

“…In both diagnostic groups, the percentage of students who cited heredity as a cause was higher among 5 th year students than 1 st year students. This finding confirms the increasing relevance assigned to biogenetic factors found in previous studies examining healthcare students' 18 causal models of mental disorders during their training (33,41,48). In the schizophrenia group, 5 th year students resulted more pessimistic about recovery, and perceived these people as more dangerous to others, compared to 1 st year students.…”

“…However, the percentages of students who reported other psychosocial causes ranged from 70.8% to 21.8% in the depression group and from 32.8% to 0.8% in the schizophrenia group. These data may suggest that students view depression as a condition related to many psychosocial adversities that may occur in the life (43), while they view schizophrenia mainly as a genetic illness (41). Although heredity was thought to be more relevant for schizophrenia than for depression, they were no such differences in the perceived relevance of chemical imbalance, illness in pregnancy and misuse of alcohol.…”

“…Students' acquisition of psychiatric skills and psychiatric rotation showed limited effects on students' prejudices about people with schizophrenia, and on their pessimism about recovery (38)(39)(40). Other studies found that psychiatric knowledge was useful to improve students attitudes towards people with mental disorders and their confidence with psychiatric drugs (38,(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47).…”

“…In the second group, students were invited to read a clinical description of schizophrenia, to make a diagnosis and then to complete the same questionnaire. This group is a subset of data collected in the 566 psychology students study described above (41). To control results for the attribution of an incorrect diagnosis -as mentioned above -only students who were able to correctly identify the disorder in a corresponding clinical description were included in the study sample.…”

Improving psychology students’ attitudes toward people with schizophrenia: A quasi-randomized controlled study.

“…Findings from the few studies exploring psychology students' views of PWS have reported that these students -similarly to medical students (Magliano, Read, Sagliocchi, Patalano, D'Ambrosio & Oliviero, 2012;Magliano, Read, Sagliocchi, Patalano & Oliviero, 2013) -are not immune to stigma and are not particularly keen to work with PWS in the future. In particular, they have been found to be significantly less comfortable treating a PWS, compared to people with other mental health problems (Buck et al, 2014), to believe that "mental patients" -including PWS -are unpredictable, antisocial and dangerous (Magliano, Read, Rinaldi, Costanzo, De Leo, Schioppa, Petrillo, 2015;Read & Harré, 2001), and to be skeptical regarding the possibility of recovery of PWS (Magliano et al, 2015).…”