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

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.