Attitude of medical students and interns towards psychiatry: A review article.

Volume : VII, Issue : V, May - 2018

Dr. Shraddha S Jadhav, Dr. Deepanjali Deshmukh, Dr. Manik Bhise, Dr. Arun Marwale

Introduction: There are still attitudes within most societies that view symptoms of psychopathology as threatening and

uncomfortable, and these attitudes frequently foster stigma and discrimination towards people with mental health problems.

Such reactions are common when people are ave enough to admit they have a mental health problem, and they can often lead

(1) on to various forms of exclusion or discrimination either within social circles or within the workplace .

Most people who live with mental illness have, at some point, been blamed for their condition. They‘ve been called names. Their

symptoms have been referred to as a phase or something they can control if they only tried. They have been illegally

discriminated against, with no justice. This is the unwieldy power that stigma holds.

Stigma causes people to feel ashamed for something that is out of their control. Worst of all, stigma prevents people from seeking

the help they need. For a group of people who already carry such a heavy burden, stigma is an unacceptable addition to their pain.

And while stigma has reduced in recent years, the pace of progress has not been quick enough.

Mental health is an ignored subject in the fi eld of medicine and public health all over the world.1–3 Medical students have neutral

or negative attitude towards Psychiatry as a discipline and career choice.4–7 Possible factors may be demographic or sociocultural;

infl uencing students before their entrance into medical school or during their medical school years.8–11

Undergraduate educational programs are found unresponsive for psychiatric teaching in most institutions.

Keeping these paradoxical issues in mind, we intended to conduct a study aiming to assess and compare the differences in

attitude towards mental illnesses and Psychiatry among the medical students in different semesters and the interns

(1) undergoing compulsory rotatory internship .