Evaluating the Attitudes of High School Students Towards Mental Patients Through Training Movies
Nilufar Khajeddin1* and Sara Farhadi21Department of psychiatry, School of Medicine, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran. 2School of Medicine, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran.
Abstract: Stigma and discrimination against the mental patients lead to weakness and helplessness in patient’s life as soon as it is diagnosed. In order to change attitudes in this regard, the effects of anti-stigma movie-based intervention on students’ attitudes towards the mentally ill was measured. The movie “A Beautiful Mind” was used as anti-stigma movie in this study and students’ attitudes were measured using the 27-item attribution questionnaire (AQ-27). The participants were firstyear high school students. All the participants were women with the mean age of 15 years. Seventy one students participated in this study. After the intervention, the specific attitudes of student particularly anger, being dangerous, fear and isolation were recovered (p <0.05), but responsibility of students towards mentally ill people reduced (P <0.05). In addition, no significant changes happened towards the components of compassion, helping, obliging and avoidance attitudes of the students. Intervention movies significantly improved the overall attitude of people towards the mentally ill people.
Keywords: Mental illness; Stigma; Movie; Attitude Back to TOC