Objective: To compare the attitudes of doctors and nurses from different psychiatric hospitals on mental illness and its stigma experienced by mentally ill patients and their family members. Methods: A questionnaire was administered to 102 doctors and 116 nurses from three psychiatric hospitals in Beijing with different mean lengths of admission and different proportions of chronic patients. Results: There was relatively little difference in the attitudes of nurses among the three hospitals, but doctors from the three centers differed significantly in their beliefs about the social worth of psychiatric patients, patients’ level of violence and the need to restrict patients’ social activities, as well as the effect of stigma on patients and their family members. These differences among physicians remained after adjusting for gender, age and level of education; this suggests that their attitudes were related to the types of patients they treated.Conclusion: The attitudes of doctors and to a lesser extent nurses on mental illness are affected by the duration of illness and level of social disability of the psychiatric patients they treat.
