Medical students' levels of empathy and stigma toward the mentally ill

The main aim of this paper was to investigate levels of empathy in medical students as well as their attitudes toward people with mental disorders. We recruited 144 students from the School of Medicine in Podgorica (Montenegro), out of which 37.7% were males and 62.3% were females. The mean age of the sample was 21.85 (SD = 2.65). We designed Scale of attitudes toward mentally ill people (SAMIP), and principal component analysis revealed that this instrument could be divided into two subscales – Positive attitudes toward the mentally ill (PAMI, α= .903) and Stigmatization of the mentally ill (SMI, α= .875). These subscales had high levels of reliability (i.e. internal consistency). The second measure was Empathy Questionnaire which is a unidimensional tool with a very high level of internal consistency (α= .924). The results revealed a high positive correlation between empathy levels and positive attitudes towards people with mental illness, a low correlation of empathy with the year of study, a low negative correlation between stigmatizing the mentally ill and participants' age, as well as low positive correlations of proneness to stigma with students' GPA and expectations of their profession. Recommendations for further research in this field were listed as well.