University students' attitudes towards mental patients and psychiatric treatment

Background: Public attitudes towards mental patients and psychiatric treatment are mostly unfavorable. Mental patients tend to conceal their illness or selectively disclose their treatment histories to someone they trust. Aims: To examine the university students' attitudes towards different information regarding a person labeled as mentally ill. Methods: We designed seven descriptions of a mentally ill person of varying past and current treatment histories and randomly assigned 308 university undergraduates to read one of the descriptions. Subjects rated their willingness to interact with the hypothetical case using a 19-item social distance scale. Results: Greater social distance was associated with non-medical field of study, no previous contact with the mentally ill and female gender. Subjects without previous contact with mentally ill individuals kept greater distance from a discharged mental patient receiving psychiatric care than a mental patient who did not require medications nor psychiatric follow-up. In contrast, respondents who had previous contact with the mentally ill were more willing to interact with a discharged mental patient receiving psychiatric care comparing with a person labeled as mentally ill alone and a mental patient who had never been admitted to hospital. Conclusions: Implications of our findings in clinical management and designing stigma-reducing programme are discussed.