Graduate social work students’ perceptions and attitude toward mental illness: implications for practice in developing countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental health stigma is an integral part of the problems faced by individuals diagnosed with mental illness in developing countries. Though Ghana enacted a new Mental Health Law (Act 846) in 2012 with emphasis on community-based care, concerns persist as social workers tend to distance themselves from the field. For CBC to succeed, social workers must opt for a career in the mental healthcare field. The question that arises is how willing social work students are to pursue a career in mental health. The paper explores the perceptions and attitudes of Graduate Social Work students towards mental illness and people living with mental illness. Socio-cultural and religious beliefs about mental illness continue to dominate perceptions about mental illness and fuel stigma. Many social work students are reluctant or unwilling to work with persons living with mental illness due to such beliefs and negative personal experiences. Opportunities to engage positively with persons living with mental illness, and inclusion of core courses in mental health in social work curricular could pave the way for minimising stigma and getting more professionals interested in a career in mental health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".