Attitudes towards People with Mental Illness among Professionals Working in a Psychiatric Hospital in Rwanda

Aims: This quantitative study investigated the attitudes toward people with mental illness among professionals working in Ndera neuropsychiatric hospital in Rwanda. The purpose of this study was to determine whether there are differences in attitudes between direct care providers and supportive professionals towards the people with mental illness. Methods: The Community Attitudes towards Mentally Ill (CAMI) scale (Dear & Taylor, 1982) was used. A total of 72 members of the staff, including 55 directly involved staff members and 17 support staff members, participated in the survey. Results: The mean score is 3.98 for authoritarianism, 3.75 for social restrictiveness, 3.88 for benevolence, and 3.87 for community mental health ideology attitudes subscales. There is no statistically significant difference between the two groups in their overall scale scores. However, directly involved staff members had a greater mean score on many individual items (P≥0.05). Demographic variables did not account for the variance within the two groups (P≥0.05). 87.27% of our respondents think that staff members, patients and family members can be involved in the decision making process and 70.59% appreciate that it is good to involve staff, patients and family relatives in this process. Negative attitudes towards people with mental illness admitted to Ndera neuropsychiatric hospital are also present, even though the majority of our respondents have favorable attitudes towards the people with mental illness. There is the need to explore the influence of staff attitudes on the delivery of high quality healthcare.