ABSTRACT
Purpose: To study the attitudes of nursing students towards psychiatry, psychiatrists, mental health, mental illness and mentally ill persons before exposure to training in mental hospital and to find out if there is any difference between pre training and post training attitude Study design: Prospective comparative study. Methodology: 500 GNM. nursing students and 500 Bsc nursing students were taken in the sample who were posted to IMH, Amritsar for training. Their attitude towards psychiatry was assessed by applying two scales i.e. Mental Illness: Clinicians' Attitude Scale (MICA-4) and Opening Minds Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC) before and after the end of the training. Their score was compared within the group and between the groups to detect any improvement in their attitude after the training period. ANOVAand chi square tests were used for statistical analysis. Results:Considering GNM group, their mean score on MICAwas 57.85±6.37 before training but after training it reduced to 55.04±6.90. On OMSHC scale their pre-training score was 59.71±7.04 which reduced to 54.52±5.59. In both of these conditions change was statistically insignificant. Considering Bsc nursing group, their pre-training score on MICA was 55.58±7.00 and their post-training score on the same scale came out to be 46.33±5.06. On OMS-HC scale their pre-training score was 57.17±4.38 which became 55.92±2.56 after the training got over. Change came out to be statistically insignificant in both of the conditions. Conclusion: Our result suggests that the training was able to produce some positive change in some of the students' overall attitudes towards psychiatry, psychiatrists, mental health and people with mental illness. Students with previous experience with people with mental illness or having utilized mental health services themselves, were shown to be less stigmatized compared to students without any such kind of experience.