Social representations of mental illness among psychological counseling students

Abstract

The current research aims to identify the social representations of mental illness among a sample of psychological counseling students at Tishreen University (first year). The sample consisted of (10) students. The descriptive approach was adopted in the research, and The sample was drawn randomly and the associative network technique of Maria De Rosa in 1995 was used. The results showed that the representations were generally negative and that the word (loneliness) was the most frequent word and constitutes the central nucleus of the social representation of mental illness, as it is the most frequent and important word and therefore  It is the most stable among the sample members and is 100% with a negative trend, as classified by the sample members.

 As for the first peripheral system, it includes the words (acceptance, responsibility, isolation, needs help, needs treatment, madness, depression, interest, deficiency), and all the words had a positive trend in a large percentage except for the words (isolation, needs help, widespread), which he classified.  Sample members thought that the word had a negative attitude and the word (needs treatment) had a neutral attitude.

   As for the second peripheral system of representation, it contains the words (lack, shame, normal, disability, integration, support, no treatment, violence, need of care, injustice, homelessness, fear, backwardness, disorder, burden, denial), which are words repeated only once.