Attitudinal Disposition of Adults Toward People With Mental Disorders in Oke-OSE Community, Ilorin East, Nigeria

Introduction: Attitudes about mental illness are shaped by personal knowledge and cultural stereotypes about mental illness, these attitudes can be expressed negatively or positively.No doubt, people exhibit various forms of attitudes towards individuals with mental health disorders especially negative attitudes as if they themselves are immuned to mental illness and this form of behaviours often leads to stigmatization and discrimination of the victims in the society.

Body: Methods: A descriptive cross sectional survey was adopted in assessing the attitudinal disposition of adults towards people with mental disorders in Oke-Ose Community. The objectives of this study were to assess the knowledge of adults on mental disorders, assess the attitude of adults towards people with mental disorders and identify factors influencing attitude towards people with mental disorders.

Data Collection: Data were collected using self- structured administered questionnaires and convenient sampling technique was used to select a sample size of 321 respondents using Fisher’s formula.

Analysis: Data collected were analyzed using SPSS Version 22 and both descriptive and inferential statistics with level of significance at 0.05 were used in the analysis of the data.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that majority 164 (51.1%) of the respondents were within ages of 18-29 years and were females 195 (60.7%), majority of the respondents had negative attitudes towards people with mental disorders despite good knowledge about mental illness. The study further revealed a significant relationship between respondents’ culture and attitudes towards people living with mental disorders with p-value (0.001) <0.05.

Conclusion: It was recommended that there is a need for sensitization of the community in order to promote positive attitudes towards people with mental disorder, this sensitization could be in form of house to house campaign, flier distribution, the use of social media like radio, television in a local community and it can include group discussion and one on one contacts.