Impact of Anti-stigma Educational Intervention about Mental Illness among Medical Students: A Quasi-experimental Study
VC06-VC09
Correspondence
Dr. VV Jagadeesh Settem,
74-8-5/1, F1, Mohana Apartment, Near Ladies Club, Prakash Nagar, Rajahmundry-533103, Andhra Pradesh, India.
E-mail: svvjagadeesh@gmail.com
Introduction: Stigma about mental illness continues to complicate the lives of those who are stigmatised, even as treatment improves their illness. Health professionals sometimes discriminate based on the general public’s stigmatising views towards people with mental illness. There is a pressing need to improve understanding of the range of factors contributing to this.
Aim: To assess the impact of anti-stigma educational intervention about mental illness among medical students and to identify the impact of this on their attitudes, knowledge, behaviour, and empathy.
Materials and Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted at a tertiary teaching hospital, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India, from September 2015 to August 2016. A total of 170 medical students from the 4th semester were included and divided into test and control groups, with 85 students in each group. Stigma was measured by assessing attitude, knowledge, behaviour, and empathy. For the test group, it was assessed at baseline, immediate post-intervention, and one year later as Test 1, 2, and 3, and baseline for the control. Mental health-related knowledge was measured with Mental Health Knowledge Schedule (MAKS) scale, attitude with Mental Illness Clinician’s Attitudes (MICA) scale, Reported and Intended Behaviour Scale (RIBS) to measure behaviour, and empathy by Jefferson Scale of Empathy Student Version (JSE-SV) scale. T-test was used to statistically analyse the data.
Results: A total of 85 participants were included in each group. Gender-wise, the mean±SD of MAKS scores were statistically significant in test 3, and also within the test group. Gender-wise MICA scores were statistically not significant in the groups, within the test group, statistically, there was a significant difference between test 2 and 3. Within the test group, for RIBS scores, there were statistically significant differences between test 1, 2, and 2, 3, and gender-wise, there was no significance. For JSE-SV scores, there was a statistically significant difference between the gender in test 2 but no significant difference among the test groups.
Conclusion: This study’s findings show that the mental health-related knowledge, attitude towards the illness, and intended behaviour of the students towards the mentally ill have significantly improved post-intervention and also had a long-term impact.