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Attitudes Towards the Mentally Ill: A Study with Health Workers at a University Hospital in Rio de Janeiro

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Abstract

As there are few studies about evaluation of attitudes of health care workers to people with mental disorders in Brazil, a cross-sectional study was carried out to assess the health professionals’ attitudes working in a university hospital in Rio de Janeiro and also examine the proportion of negative and positive attitudes endorsed by healthcare professionals in Brazil towards people with mental illness in comparison with other parts of the world. Data were collected using the Community Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill (CAMI) in a random sampling frame of health professionals (n = 246) working in a University Hospital in Rio de Janeiro between April 2013 and June 2013. The CAMI consists of four sub-scales: Authoritarianism, Benevolence, Social Restrictiveness and Community Mental Health Ideology. The results showed attitudes that range from neutral to positive, with the Benevolence and Social Restrictiveness sub-scales showing the least stigmatizing results. The following individual characteristics were associated with negative attitudes: lower levels of education and less clinical experience. In general, health workers attitudes towards service users are characterized as positive when compared with other international studies. However, educational programs for health workers should be reinforced to further promote pre-existing positive attitudes towards people with mental health and the implementation of Brazilian Mental Health Policies.

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Funding

This study was funded by FAPERJ (Rio de Janeiro State Foundation to Support Research; Grant Number: E-26/1011.843/2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Studies Center of the Municipal Institute of Health Care Juliano Moreira (CE/IMASJM), Estrada Rodrigues Caldas, 3400/3rd Floor, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 22.713-375, Brazil

    Sylvia Rosa Gonçalves Siqueira PhD

  2. Institute of Studies in Collective Health (IESC), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Avenida Horácio Macedo, S/N - Ilha do Fundão - Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, CEP 21941-598, Brazil

    Lúcia Abelha PhD, Giovanni Marcos Lovisi PhD & Keli Rodrigues Sarução M.P.H

  3. School of Public Health, Columbia University, 14, 722 West 168th Street, New York, NY, 10032, USA

    Lawrence Yang PhD

Authors
  1. Sylvia Rosa Gonçalves Siqueira PhD
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  2. Lúcia Abelha PhD
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  3. Giovanni Marcos Lovisi PhD
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  4. Keli Rodrigues Sarução M.P.H
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  5. Lawrence Yang PhD
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sylvia Rosa Gonçalves Siqueira PhD.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

The informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Research Involving Human and Animal Rights

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Siqueira, S.R.G., Abelha, L., Lovisi, G.M. et al. Attitudes Towards the Mentally Ill: A Study with Health Workers at a University Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Psychiatr Q 88, 25–38 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-016-9431-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-016-9431-5

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