Attitudes of Jordanian nursing students towards mental illness: the effect of teaching and contact on attitudes change.(Report)

Purposes: Attitudes toward mental illness and patients with mental illness influence the treatment they receive and decisions of policy makers. The purposes of this study were to assess Jordanian nursing students' attitudes towards mental illness, and to assess the effectiveness of teaching and contact on changing nursing students' attitudes about mental illness.

Methods: A quasi-experimental, one group pretest-posttest design was employed to test the hypotheses. Opinion about Mental Illness (OMI) Questionnaire which composed of five subscales was used to test the research hypotheses. The sample consisted of 193 Jordanian nursing students studying at the Hashemite University.

Results: results showed that (1) nursing students were found to have positive attitudes towards mental illness in four scales, (2) no significant differences were found between students' attitudes towards mental illness and demographics, (3) there was a significant difference in attitudes towards the mental illness between students who have previous contact with mental patients and those who did not, and (4) students' attitudes towards mental illness were changed positively in all scales after taking the course.

Conclusions: Attitudes about mental illness will positively changed if we correct some myths about it by increasing students' knowledge and by giving them the opportunity to contact those group of patients.

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Attitudes developed early in childhood, later on in life, society especially through the media, continues to modify them (McGurine, 1985). Attitudes have two general important functions: they guide behavior towards various goals away from adverse outcomes, and they help people to efficiently process complex information about the social world (Baron, 1992) Unfortunately, people with mental illness are often portrayed in a negative manner in the media (Link & Cullen, 1986). Changing the negative attitudes towards mental illness is very important since behavioral problems have replaced infectious disease as the major cause of morbidity and mortality among people (Bataglia, Coverdale, & Bushong, 1990).

Rosenberg and Hovland (1960) proposed model of attitudes. The model suggests that there were three types of information which were important in the formation of attitudes. Cognitive information, that is what people know of the attitude object (facts and believes) e.g. "the mentally ill are dangerous". Affective information which are the feelings/emotions that the attitude object arouses, e.g. "I'm frightened of the mentally ill". Behavioral information which are the knowledge of past, present, and future interactions with the attitude object, e.g. "I avoid the mentally ill".