Effects of psychiatric training on nursing students’ attitudes towards people with mental illness in Japan

Abstract

Background: Nursing students’ attitudes towards people with mental illness can be influenced by training experience.Aim: To examine the relationship between the attitudes of nursing students towards people with mental illness and the psychiatric training imparted to the students by using textual data and conducting frequency analysis.Methods: We identified the words/phrases which were considered to represent the attitudes towards people with mental illness at pre-training (T1) and post-training (T2) stages from reports written by 76 Japanese nursing students, and examined the differences in the frequencies of the words/phrases used at T1 and T2.Results: With regard to the students’ attitudes towards people with mental illness, generally, the frequencies of words/phrases that had somewhat negative to strongly negative nuances were high at T1, whereas those of the words/phrases that had somewhat positive or neutral nuances were high at T2. Also, analysis showed that words/phrases such as ‘scary’ were used more frequently at T1, whereas words/phrases such as ‘not scary’ were used more often at T2.Conclusion: The students’ attitudes may change favourably owing to, at least in part, psychiatric training.