Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Stigmatising attitude of medical students towards a psychiatry label

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of a psychiatric label attached to an apparently normal person on the attitude of final year medical students at a Nigerian university.

Methods: A questionnaire with sections on demographic information, a single-paragraph case description illustrating a normal person, a social distance scale and questions on expected burden was used to elicit responses from 144 final year medical students who have had previous exposure to psychiatric posting.

The students consisted of two randomly assigned groups; group A received a case description with a psychiatric label attached while group B received the same case description but without a psychiatric label.

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