Professionals' attitudes towards mental disorder

Whilst differing perspectives can be an asset, they have also been found to lead to conflict and misunderstanding in multidisciplinary practice. Evidence suggests that different mental health disciplines hold differing attitudes towards mental disorder, reflecting differing implicit models held. To contribute to our understanding of this problem the present study investigates psychologists’ concepts of mental disorder, building on a pilot study conducted by Harland et al. with psychiatrists (2009). The Maudsley Attitude Questionnaire was used in an online survey of trainee clinical psychologists (N = 288). Principal components analysis was used to investigate implicit models. It was hypothesised that psychologists’ understandings of mental disorder would differ from psychiatrists'. The findings showed that psychologists endorsed different models for different diagnostic categories of mental disorder. Psychologists favoured the social realist model overall. Principal components reflecting a biological-psychosocial continuum, and scales of cognitive/behavioural and psychodynamic/spiritual model endorsement were revealed.
The study concluded that, when compared to the findings of Harland et al. (2009), psychologists appear to make more use of psychosocial and less use of biological factors in their understanding of mental disorder than do psychiatrists. There appear to be fundamental differences in psychologists' and psychiatrists’ implicit models of mental disorder. A greater emphasis on multidisciplinary training initiatives is recommended.