Mental health literacy: The influence of professional and public discourses on Allied Health students' perceptions of dementia

This paper reports on qualitative data collected from allied healthcare students' (n = 300) response to two open ended questions that required them to describe the greatest impairments caused by dementia and what they feared most about dementia. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that memory loss and cognitive problems were cited as the greatest impairments in dementia, while loss of social interaction and loss of independence (particularly family and friends) were the most dominant themes in relation to fears of developing dementia. Further analysis of individual responses showed that typically the participants' descriptions reflected both professional and public domain discourses associated with dementia. The data raise questions relating to how we train healthcare professionals in relation to mental health literacy in the case of dementia.