Impact of Anti-stigma Educational Intervention about Mental Illness among Medical Students: A Quasi-experimental Study

Introduction: Stigma about mental illness continues to complicate the lives of the stigmatised even as treatment improves their illness. Health professionals sometimes discriminate based on general public’s stigmatising views towards people with mental illness. There is a pressing need to improve understanding of the range of factors contributing to this.

Aim: To assess the impact of anti-stigma educational intervention about mental illness among medical students and to identify the impact of this on their attitude, knowledge, behaviour and empathy.

Materials and Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted at a tertiary teaching hospital, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India, from September 2015 to August 2016. A total of 170 medical students from 4th semester were included and divided into test and control groups with 85 students in each group. Stigma was measured by assessing attitude, knowledge, behaviour and empathy. For the test group, it was assessed at baseline, immediate postintervention and one year later as Test 1, 2 and 3 and baseline for controll. Mental health-related knowledge was measured with Mental Health Knowledge Schedule (MAKS) scale, attitude with Mental Illness Clinician’s Attitudes (MICA) scale, Reported and Intended Behaviour Scale (RIBS) to measure behaviour and empathy by Jefferson Scale of Empathy Student Version (JSE-SV) scale. T-test was used to statistically analyse the data.

Results: Total 85 participants were included in each group. Genderwise, the mean±SD of MAKS scores were statistically significant in test 3 also within the test group. Genderwise MICA scores were statistically not significant in the groups, within the test group statistically there was significant difference between test 2 and 3. Within the test group, for RIBS scores were statistically significant between test 1, 2 and 2, 3 and genderwise there was no significance. For JSE-SV scores, there was statistically significant difference between the gender in test 2 but no significant difference among the test groups.

Conclusion: This study findings show that the mental health related knowledge, attitude towards the illness and the intended behaviour of the students towards the mentally ill have significantly improved postintervention and also had a long-term impact.