Table 2 Item response on Attitudes to Psychiatry (ATP-18) questionnaire [20]

No.^a

17

Empathy with patients is as important as factual knowledge in clinical practice

15

Psychiatric skills are essential in general practice.

7

The problems presented by psychiatric patients are often particularly interesting and challenging.

11

Mental illness presents us with one of the great challenges within the field of medicine.

13

Psychiatrists are more concerned than other doctors to establish a rapport with their patients.

5

Psychiatrists try to treat the whole patient and not just the disease.

14

Too little time is devoted to psychiatry in the medical/nursing school curriculum.

6

Psychiatrists are at the forefront of the movement to humanize medicine.

2

Psychiatrists are, on the whole, less dogmatic than other doctors.

No.^a

Items expressing negative view

1

Psychiatrists are often merely failed physicians.

10

Within medicine, psychiatry is one of the least important specialties.

3

Psychiatrists tend to be more emotionally unstable than other doctors.

8

Psychiatric patients hardly ever get better.

4

Psychiatrists are held in poor regard by most other doctors.

16

The practice of psychiatry is unrewarding because treatment is so lengthy and the results inconclusive.

12

Psychiatry is too inexact; it seems to lack a proper scientific basis.

18

Psychiatric patients, generally speaking, are not easy to like.

9

Psychiatric patients tend to make more emotional demands on their doctors than other patients.