Change in Perception of Mental Illnesses by under Graduate Medical Students of Addis Ababa following Psychiatric Attachment1

That the mental health problems are as common in the developing countries as in the developed ones has been amply shown by many epidemiological studies. Providing mental health care to a large patient population in developing countries has remained an uphill task. One of the strategies is to involve general health practitioners in mental health services for which they must be given adequate training in their undergraduate medical curriculum. Success of a training programme depends upon the change in attitudes among the trainees regarding mental health problems. Vignettes have been successfully used to measure such changes. In this paper, the authors discuss in brief the difficulties in the delivery of mental health care and report their experience with vignettes as an evaluative design to gauze the attitudinal changes among undergraduate medical students in Addis Ababa.