Psychiatric patient denial of mental illness as a normal process.

The self-perceptions of 50 first-admission psychiatric patients are compared with their perceptions of the mentally ill and psychiatric staff's views of the mentally ill but do not characterize themselves in terms of this stereotype. On the other hand they do view themselves as being much more like the mentally ill than usual. Two common perspectives on patient denial of mental illness, the sociological and the medical/clinical, are examined with respect to their ability to accommodate these results and it is concluded that a third perspective on patient denial of mental illness is required. This perspective views patient denial of mental illness as a normal process dependent on two mechanisms: rational rejection of self-stereotype identity and minor self-deception resulting from egocentric biases which play an important integrative role within the personality.

Levels of measured hopelessness in physically-ill patients.

Beck et al.'s Hopelessness Scale was administered to a group of 60 general hospital patients suffering from a variety of physical disorders. The group consisted of 30 chronically- and 30 acutely-ill patients. The mean Hopelessness Scale score for the whole group was 3.75 (SD 2.7). This mean score did not differ significantly from the mean Hopelessness Scale score obtained from a large sample from the general population. However it was significantly lower than the mean score of 40 clinically-depressed psychiatric hospital patients. No significant differences were found between the levels of measured hopelessness of the chronically ill and acutely ill.

An investigation of change in medical students' conceptualizations of psychiatric patients due to a short training course in psychiatry.

The paper describes an investigation of medical students' conceptualizations of different psychiatric patients categories, using the Katz-Braly stereotype measuring technique and the semantic differential technique. The conceptual content of sixteen fourth year medical students' stereotypes of psychiatric patient categories was elicited and their evaluations of the categories were measured. These measures were taken before and after a two-month training course in psychiatry and special attention was paid to changes that appeared to result from the educational process. The Katz-Braly stereotype measure produces a work picture of each patients category involving four traits; for instance for the category neurotic the following traits were derived: 'temperamental', 'hypochondriacal', 'worried' and 'tense'. The important triats for each category were analysed separately to determine if any statistically significant changes in the stereotype had occurred over the two-month training course. Several significant additions and omissions of traits were found. These changes may be explained as the result of teaching, the students' direct experience of psychiatric patients and their acquisition of a new technical vocabulary. Despite the changes in the students' stereotypes of patients, their evaluations of the patients, as measured by the semantic differential, remained substantially unaltered by the training course.