Attitudes toward mental illnes and their relationship to social structure and mental hospital bed utilization in two finnish rural communities

Abstract

The attitudes toward mental illness of the people of two rural communities belonging to the same mental health district in Finland are analysed on the basis of Durkheim's and Allardt's theories of social structure. One community was mainly agricultural (community A) and the other was industrialized (community I). Use was made of a Likert-type attitude scale created for the purpose, and the personal interview technique was employed. The sample consisted of 200 individuals and the response percentage was 94. The main hypothesis of the study, introduced on both sociological and psychiatric grounds, was that attitudes in community A would be more negative than in community I, but the results failed to confirm this. On the other hand, men's attitudes were more positive than those of women in both communities, but to a statistically significant extent so only in community I. Moreover, age and sex correlated with attitudes in this community: attitudes were more positive, the older a man and the younger a woman. When age was considered singly and as a continuous variable it did not, however, correlate with attitudes. A positive association between attitudes and educational level was observed in both communities, and the same was true of the number of sources of information about mental illness and attitudes. In the Conclusions section the writers state that attitudes may be considered as intervening variables and that no far-reaching conclusions concerning causal relationships can be based on them.