Belief-System and the Concept of Mental Illness among Medical Students in a Developing Country: A Nigerian Example

The report focuses on the concept of mental illness among Nigerian medical students. It also deals with their attitudes toward patients who might share a magicoreligious orientation in the etiology of illness as well as their reaction to the interplay between traditional and modern medicine. To this end, students in the penultimate and final years at four medical schools were surveyed (such students would have been sufficiently exposed to various specialties in the field of medicine, including psychiatry). The major findings from our study are: (1) many medical students in the four medical schools believe that mental illness can be influenced by witchcraft despite the modernizing influence of western education; and (2) a similarly large proportion of the students feel strongly that native healing or traditional medicine is relevant to the practice of modern medicine in Nigeria.