ABSTRACT
Objective To understand students' attitude changes before and after they started their internships in the department of psychiatry and evaluate their teachers' teaching methods. Methods Using a self-made questionnaire of Psychiatric Internship Attitude that has passed the reliability and validity test, from 2015 to 2016, a total of 208 undergraduate students in the clinical medicine mental health direction of Chongqing Medical University were selected through cluster random sampling to investigate their attitude changes towards psychiatry before and after they started their internships. At the end of their internships, another self-made Psychiatric Teach Evaluation Forming Questionnaire of the reliability and validity test was used to preliminarily evaluate the students' assessment of the teaching situation of their teachers during the internship. Results Before the internships, through the survey we found that 44.2% of the students felt nervous, 37.0% fearful, 57.2% compassionate, and the percentage of students who were willing to work in the department of psychiatry is only 41.4%. Through investigation, teachers carried out the teaching work with targeted goals, at the end of the internship the tension and fear decreased to 0.0%, the proportion of empathy rose to 78.4%, and the differences are statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusion The students' attitude survey at the beginning of their internship can help teachers improve their teaching attitudes, con-cepts and methods, and make students' negative attitudes towards mental patients and psychiatry significantly reduce.