Attitudes towards Mental Illness of the Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Undergraduate student’s attitudes towards people with mental illness could impact how they interact with, provide opportunities for and assist people with mental illness. The present study was conducted to investigate attitudes towards people with mental illness of the undergraduate students. For the purpose, the Bangla version of the perception of mental illness scale (Barman & Saha, 2020) was used for data collection which was originally developed by Sadik et al. (2010). The study consisted of 120 undergraduate students of Rajshahi University among them 60 were male and 60 were female. Results from the study indicated that large proportions of respondents hold stigmatizing attitudes towards marry with mentally ill and worked with the mentally ill person. Similarly, the majority of participants thought that mentally ill people should not get married, they should be prevented from having children and mentally ill people are unable to make decisions. Results also revealed that most of the respondents thought that mental illness is mainly caused by misuse of drugs and bad things happening to the person than genetic inheritance, physical illness, and God punishment. In addition, results also showed that a majority of participants thought that mental illness information as well as services was not available in their country.