Attitudes of Nursing and Medicine Undergraduates Students towards Mental Illness at Kirkuk University

the Iraqi community attitudes towards mental disorder remains at undesirable level and health care providers attitudes towards mental illness are identical their community. It is important to know the attitudes of undergraduate medical students toward mental health and mental disorder as a care provider in the future. A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out in Nursing and Medicine Colleges at Kirkuk University among students in the final year of study (senior students). A purposive sampling implemented to select 97 undergraduate nursing and medicine students. The Attitudes Towards Mental Disorder scale were adopted to measure student's attitudes. The data were entered and analysed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23. The results reveal that nursing had better attitudes towards mental disorder than medicine students and significant relationship between students gender and restrictiveness sub-scale of attitudes towards mental illness. Highly significant relationship between student's age and attitudes sub-scales of (separatism, stereotyping and totals of sub-scales) in addition to a significant relationship between student's age and restrictiveness sub-scale of attitudes. The correlation among sub-scales indicates that most of them had a positive association among each other bilaterally at the 0.01 level and at the 0.05 level.