Influence of contact with schizophrenia on implicit attitudes towards schizophrenia patients held by clinical residents

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Amane Tateno¹  Ataru Omori¹  Yoshitaka Kawashima¹  Yoshiro Okubo¹  Hidehiko Takahashi²  Kazuhisa Takemura³  Takashi Ideno³ 

[1] Department of Neuropsychiatry, Nippon Medical School, 1-1-5 Sendagi, 113-8602, Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan;Department of Psychiatry, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, 54 Shogoin-Kawara-cho, 606-8507, Kyoto, Sakyo-ku, Japan;Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO), Japan Science and Technology Agency, 4-1-8 Honcho, 332-0012, Kawaguchi, Saitama, Japan;Department of Psychology, Waseda University, 1-24-1 Toyama, 162-8644, Tokyo, Shinjyuku-ku, Japan;

关键词: Prejudice;    Stigma;    Implicit association test;    Education;    Schizophrenia;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-12-205

 received in 2012-02-01, accepted in 2012-10-25,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPatients with schizophrenia and their families have suffered greatly from stigmatizing effects. Although many efforts have been made to eradicate both prejudice and stigma, they still prevail even among medical professionals, and little is known about how contact with schizophrenia patients affects their attitudes towards schizophrenia.MethodsWe assessed the impact of the renaming of the Japanese term for schizophrenia on clinical residents and also evaluated the influence of contact with schizophrenia patients on attitudes toward schizophrenia by comparing the attitudes toward schizophrenia before and after a one-month clinical training period in psychiatry. Fifty-one clinical residents participated. Their attitudes toward schizophrenia were assessed twice, before and one month after clinical training in psychiatry using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as well as Link’s devaluation-discrimination scale.ResultsThe old term for schizophrenia, “Seishin-Bunretsu-Byo”, was more congruent with criminal than the new term for schizophrenia, “Togo-Shitcho-Sho”, before clinical training. However, quite opposite to our expectation, after clinical training the new term had become even more congruent with criminal than the old term. There was no significant correlation between Link's scale and IAT effect.ConclusionsRenaming the Japanese term for schizophrenia still reduced the negative images of schizophrenia among clinical residents. However, contact with schizophrenia patients unexpectedly changed clinical residents’ attitudes towards schizophrenia negatively. Our results might contribute to an understanding of the formation of negative attitudes about schizophrenia and assist in developing appropriate clinical training in psychiatry that could reduce prejudice and stigma concerning schizophrenia.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Omori et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.