Undergraduate Nursing Students' Attitudes towards Mental Illness: Implications for Specific Academic Education

Abstract

Background:Health care professions are not immune to social prejudices and surprisingly share the general public's attitude attributed to people with mental illness. Nursing students are future health manpower research related to nursing students attitudes toward mental illness is limited.Aim:The aim of this following study is to examine the undergraduate nursing students’ attitudes toward people with mental illness.Materials and Methods:Cross-sectional descriptive design was adopted for the present study. A total of 148 undergraduate nursing students were purposively selected to complete self-reported questionnaires.Results:The nursing students have significant positive attitudes towards mental illness in three of the six attitudes factors: Restrictiveness (8.59), benevolence (29.8) and stigmatization (9.18). However, these students have negative attitudes in separatism (27.1), stereotype (11.5) and pessimistic predictions (11.7) domains as they rated high.Conclusion:Academic education in this area must be planned so as to favor the change of the attitudes that include greater use of teaching strategies that challenge beliefs and assumptions and promote a commitment to provide holistic care to people with mental illness.

Effectiveness of direct contact intervention with people with mental illness to reduce stigma in nursing students

“…Regarding the attitudes of nursing students towards people with mental illnesses, the data are inconclusive. While Henderson et al (2007) and Tee and Uzar Ozcetin (2016) have clearly found negative attitudes, other studies reached more ambiguous conclusions (Poreddi et al 2014).…”

“…() and Tee and Uzar Ozcetin () have clearly found negative attitudes, other studies reached more ambiguous conclusions (Poreddi et al . ).…”

The Nursing Student's Attitude Toward Psychiatric Patients: Is Changeable After Completing the Theoretical and Clinical Course.

“…But the total score of the attitude towards psychiatric knowledge and teaching was not significantly changed (table 5). Table ( 6) showed that out of 8 items of the attitude towards psychiatric treatment and hospitals, only three of them showed slight improvement after studying the course which includes: Psychiatrist has very little to do to help their patients, The practice of psychotherapy basically is fraudulent since there is no strong evidence that it is effective and Psychiatric treatment has been more effective in the recent year while the total score of the attitude towards psychiatric treatment and hospitals was not significantly differed. There was slight improve in the average total attitude score of the students being 92.67±7.90 before studying the course and 95.34±8.32 after it, with no significant difference (table7).…”

“…This finding is consistent with previous researches revealing that nursing student's attitudes towards mental illness and psychiatric patients have been changed for better after the psychiatric course (10, 17, 18&19). Also, Poreddi et al (6) mentioned that nursing students have significant positive attitudes toward mental illness and they agreed that psychiatric ill patients can enjoy them personal and social life events such as marriage, working, having children or family. However this finding is inconsistent with research indicating that students attitudes toward mentally ill patients show no change after clinical contact (20) as suggested by Singh et al (21) changing attitudes involves a complex process, depending on many factors rather than patient contact alone.…”

“…Mental health professionals, the subject of psychiatry, psychiatrists and the psychiatric ill patients are affected by the negative attitude and the cultural stereotypes of the general public. Health care team are not immune to social prejudices and share the general public's attitude toward people with mental illness (6) . Unfortunately, this negative attitudes toward mentally ill is not in doubt even among nursing students that lead to a major effect on the quality and outcome of care for psychiatric ill patients (7) .…”