Attitudes to psychiatry and to mental illness among nursing students: Adaptation and use of two validated instruments in preclinical education.
Stigma towards psychiatry and to people with serious mental illness (SMI) are prevalent among healthcare providers and can adversely affect patient care. Such stigmatized views can adversely affect recruitment into the already underserved field of mental health nursing. We adapted two stigma-related instruments in a sample of nursing students and examined change in scores after participation in an eight-week preclinical psychiatry curriculum. Our goal was to identify stigma-malleable opportunities that would inform refinements in future iterations of a preclinical psychiatry curriculum in nursing. We made minor adaptations to the Attitudes to Psychiatry (ATP-30) and the Attitudes to Mental Illness (AMI) instruments. We invited first-year nursing students to complete assessments at two time points: before and after completion of an eight-week core course in preclinical psychiatry. 71 students completed the assessment at both time points. ATP-30 and three of its eight subscale scores improved by course's endpoint. By contrast, AMI scores did not change. Compared to medical student published norms, nursing students in our sample had higher (less stigmatized) average scores. The ATP-30 and the AMI can be easily adapted to a nursing student population and may prove useful in tracking specific anti-stigma educational interventions. A general psychiatry course during nursing school is, it and of itself, unlikely to change biased views about SMI and should be enhanced with exposure to, and interaction with individuals with lived experiences of mental illness, ideally by nurse educators and practicing nurses.