Attitudes of medical students towards persons with mental disorders: a comparative study between Japan and Thailand

This study was conducted at three universities, two in Japan and one in Thailand, in order to elucidate the effects of medical education, especially with regard to contact experience on medical students' attitudes toward persons with mental disorders. Questionnaires, which included the Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons Scale (ATDP) and the Contact with Disabled Persons Scale (CDP), were distributed to 1st year students prior to the commencement of their medicine/psychiatry studies and distributed to 6th (or 5th) year students who had completed their psychiatric curriculum. The ATDP scores were lower for 6th year students at all universities, suggesting that post-education students had a more unfavorable attitude than pre-education students. Thai students indicated more unfavorable attitudes than did the Japanese students. Three factors were extracted from the ATDP scale and termed: negation of character, negation of ability and affirmation of normality. Four factors from the CDP scale were extracted and labeled intimate contact experience, ordinary contact experience, unpleasant contact experience and pleasant contact experience. Greater negative attitudes of post-education students than pre-education students were thought to attribute mainly to an increase in factor score of negation of ability and this result was correlated with an increase in factor score of ordinary contact experience in post-education students. Of the three ATDP factor scores, the higher score of Thai students for negation of character contributed to their overall unfavorable attitude scores. The cross-national similarities and differences of students' attitudes towards and contact experience with mentally disordered persons were discussed from the viewpoint of medical education.