Attitude of medical undergraduate and postgraduate students towards psychiatry: a cross-sectional study

Background: It is a universally known fact that psychiatric disorders are common, affecting millions of populations worldwide. Psychiatry as a discipline of medicine has been emerging in the recent years. Nevertheless, it has become apparent from studies that there has been a negative attitude towards psychiatry presumably due to the prevailing various myths and misconceptions in a budding medical student's mind. Objectives and methodology: Aim was to assess and compare the attitude of undergraduate and postgraduate medical students towards psychiatry and to know the gender differences in the attitude. This is a cross-sectional study. Participants consisted of students studying in SN Medical College, Bagalkot. Subjects were given specially designed socio-demographic proforma and Attitudes Toward Psychiatry-30 items (ATP-30) questionnaire which is a five-point attitude scale for assessing the attitude. The data collected was analysed with the help of SPSS version 11. Result: The sample consisted of 469 subjects of which 48% were males and 52% were females. In total, 80.8% (n=379) subjects reported to have positive attitude towards psychiatry. Females had more positive attitude than male. We did not find any difference in the attitude of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Conclusion: Even though our study revealed a positive attitude towards psychiatry, there is always a way for improvements in the form of better psychiatry training at the undergraduate level. There is a need to conduct multi-centric studies which can involve larger sample size.