Abstract
Objective: The widening gap between the need for mental health professionals and the low percentages of medical students pursuing a psychiatric career urges an examination of how individual traits, stigma attitudes, and related intended behaviors interact to better explain the variance in preferences for psychiatry as a specialty choice. Methods: Participants were second-year, preclinical medical students at Bologna University, Italy. The study consisted in completion of an online questionnaire evaluating preferences for the psychiatry specialty (one single item and a scenario-based response), personality traits (the Big Five Questionnaire), attitudes (Mental Illness for Clinicians’ Attitude scale), behaviors (Reported and Intended Behavior Scale), and fears toward mental illness (questionnaire created ad hoc). Sociodemographic data were also collected. Results: A total of 284 medical students [58.8% female, mean (SD) age 20.47 ± 1.90] completed the questionnaire. Preference for the psychiatry specialty was significantly and positively associated with openness to experience and negatively related with Mental Illness for Clinicians’ Attitude scale and Reported and Intended Behavior Scale. The full-mediation model provided good indices explaining 18% of the variance. Mental illness stigma was strongly and negatively associated with both openness to experience and preference for psychiatry, and the mediation results evidenced a positive and significant effect. Conclusions: Mental illness stigma influences medical students’ choice of psychiatry as a specialty, accounting for the effects of the openness to experience trait. Stigma awareness and reduction programs should be introduced as early as possible in medical education.
Highlights
The psychiatry specialty remains an unpopular choice for medical students [1, 2] despite the soaring demand for mental health professionals worldwide [3]
A higher level of mental illness stigma was reported by male students compared to female students (p < 0.001), while no significant differences were found in terms of avoidant behavior and/or social distance
Gender differences were observed regarding fear of specific mental illnesses, with female students reporting higher levels of fear of eating disorders compared to students (p = 0.002)
Summary
The psychiatry specialty remains an unpopular choice for medical students [1, 2] despite the soaring demand for mental health professionals worldwide [3]. Among other individual traits, openness to experience is the most reliably reported in psychiatrists and medical students with a predilection for psychiatry as a future career choice [4, 10,11,12,13,14], but see [9] for mixed results. Perhaps because it is seemingly self-evident, how openness to experience affects medical students’ choice of psychiatry specialty has not been systematically examined. Considering that prejudice can be reliably related to some personality traits more than others [16,17,18] and, it might be tendentially less present in those projecting themselves in a psychiatric career, related research has highlighted how stigmatizing attitudes about persons affected by mental illness may influence medical students’ view and choice of psychiatry as a medical specialty [19]
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