Medical students' attitude towards psychiatry: a ten‐year comparison †

Medical students' interest in and attitudes toward psychiatry, both as a field of education and as a medical specialty, have been explored by a number of investigators. The present study compares two series of investigations completed at the McGill University teaching hospitals over a ten year span and involving third year medical students in 1968-69 (n = 59) and in 1978-79 (n = 168). The findings of these two studies are evaluated in two parts: (1) comparison of attitudes toward psychiatry before and after clinical training in 1978-79. (2) comparison of the results obtained in 1969 with those in 1979. The results of the comparison showed that students currently put more emphasis on the clinical aspects of psychiatric training and less on the theoretical and research aspects of psychiatry. Thirty-two percent of students in 1979 found psychotherapy to be the most useful treatment modality as compared with only 10 percent on 1969. Findings reflecting the usefulness of organic therapies in psychiatry remained fairly consistent, but behaviour therapy was found to be less useful by students in 1979 than in 1969. In the 1969 survey, 2 per cent of the third year students indicated an interest in psychiatry as a future career as compared with 3.3 per cent in 1979. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the psychiatric training programmes in medical schools.