Perspectives of GCSE students attending a psychiatry summer school in south London

Wyke, Clementine; de Bernier, Glori-Louise; Lam, Chun Chiang Sin Fai; Holt, Clare; Butler, Sophie; Rajamani, Anto Praveen Rajkumar; Wilson Jones, Charlotte

Abstract

AIMS AND METHOD

To evaluate a pilot psychiatry summer school for GCSE students in terms of participant experience, impact on attitudes to mental illness and perception of psychiatry as a career option. This was performed using the Community Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill (CAMI) scale, career choice questionnaires and a discussion group following the week-long programme attended by twenty-six students.

RESULTS

Students were significantly more likely to choose psychiatry after the summer school (p=0.01). There were statistically significant changes in score for social restrictiveness (p=0.04) and community mental health ideology (CMHI) (p=0.02). Qualitative analysis generated four themes: variation in expectations, limited prior knowledge, perception of the summer school itself and uniformly positive attitudes to psychiatry after the summer school.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS

Targeting students at this early stage appears to be an under explored positive intervention, for improving both attitudes towards mental illness and recruitment to psychiatry.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 1, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jul 27, 2020
• Publication Date: 2021-04
• Deposit Date: Jun 4, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 30, 2020
• Journal: BJPsych Bulletin
• Print ISSN: 2056-4708
• Electronic ISSN: 2056-4694
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 114-119
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2020.76
• Keywords: Education and training; recruitment; summer school; stigma and discrimination; school students.
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4575490
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin
• Additional Information: Copyright: Copyright © The Authors 2020; License: This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.