Abdul Wahab Yousafzai, Mohammad Naim Siddiqi, Naila Bhutto, Syed Ahmer, Mohammed Zaman.
The medical student's stigmatizing attitude towards psychiatric label.
J Pak Psych Soc Jan ;8(2):90-3.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of a psychiatric label attached to a normal person, on the attitude of final year medical students in Pakistan. Design: Cross-sectional survey Place and duration of study: This This survey was conducted among final year medical students in Chandka Medical College Larkana, Pakistan in July 2009. Subjects and Methods: Self administered questionnaire was used consisting of a demographic details, a single-paragraph vignette depicting a normal person and a modified social distance scale was used to elicit responses from final year medical students. The randomly selected students were divided in to two groups; group A received a case description with a psychiatric label attached while group B received the same case description without a label. Results: Response rate was of more than 99%. Out of them 61.4% were males. More than half responded to the questionnaire with the attached psychiatric label and 48.8% responded to the questionnaire without label. Mean (SD) age of the participants was 23.76 (4.43). Significant number of Students were, unwilling to do shopping from the market run by the person with label (p = 0.025), and to have him in his work place (p = 0.024) or share room with him (p = 0.023) as compared to the willing students. Also significant number of students thought that friendship with the psychiatric patient will adversely affect their mental health (p=0.03). Conclusion: These results confirm that label does affect view of medical students towards individual the irrespective of his/her behavior.

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