- 學位論文
Attitudes towards the mentally ill, mental illness and the location for mental health facilities : a Hong Kong study on secondary school students
Attitudes towards the mentally ill, mental illness and the location for mental health facilities : a Hong Kong study on secondary school students
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並列摘要
(Uncorrected OCR) ABSTRACT A cross-sectional survey study had been carried out on 662 secondary school students about their attitudes towards the mentally ill and mental illness. Using the framework of attitude referents and dimensions of evaluation, such attitudes were assessed by (a) their beliefs about the cause, treatment and recovery of mental illness (b) their beliefs about the traits and characteristics of mentally ill people (c) the perceived negative impact of mental health facilities to the neighbourhood and the respondents’ suggested location for mental health facilities. Moreover, respondents’ background information such as sex, age, type of accommodation and their familiarities with the mentally ill were collected to see if these were factors affecting the attitudes. While content analysis on the descriptive statistics was used to obtain the profile of the attitudes, factor analysis and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship among the attitudes regarding different dimensions of evaluation. Moreover, hypotheses regarding any effect of the factors on the attitudes were tested using either mean tests or Chi-square tests of independence. It was found that the respondents generally shared the beliefs that most mentally ill people were unpredictable, lack of accountability and had difficulties to communicate with other people. They were also quite convinced that the neighbourhood of the mental health facilities would have uneasy feeling about the facilities. In general, these attitudes were not associated with the factors considered in this study. Such negative attitudes towards the mentally ill were further reflected in the finding that only less than 5% of the respondents had regarded the public housing estate as a more desirable location than rural area and ’somewhere nearby hospital’ as the location for the facilities. Although in the local context most of the mental health facilities had been located in the public housing estates, it appeared that that the ideology of community rehabilitation was still hardly accepted by the respondents and the facilities were just physically close but socially remote from the community. Regarding the factors affecting these attitudes, it was found that those who or whose family members had previous contact with the mentally ill or psychiatric services tended to suggest the public housing estate as the most desirable location of the facilities. However, the preference for the location was not associated with other personal characteristics such as sex, age, and type of accommodation. It was also found that the evaluation on help effectiveness and the level of perceived negative impact of the facilities had interaction effect on the preference for the location. While higher level of perceived negative impact was shared among those who suggested rural area as the location for the facilities, those who had lower level of the perceived negative impact tend to suggest either public housing estate or ’somewhere nearby hospital’ contingency on the evaluation on help effectiveness: The more the positive evaluation on the help effectiveness, the more they tend to suggest ’some nearby hospital’ rather than public housing estate. Moreover, those who suggested ’somewhere nearby hospital’ and rural area had the similar level of evaluation on help effectiveness which was relatively higher than that those who suggested public housing estate. In addition to the finding that the respondents tended to have psychosocial orientation towards the cause and the help offered to the mentally ill, it appeared that the respondents were not aware that the community was a more desirable location for offering such help to the mentally ill than those locations that were socially and physically isolated or ready for hospitalisation. It was recommended that, the last issue being highlighted by the present study, should be targeted for further concern in the community education regarding the promotion of more positive attitudes towards the mentally ill.