Attitudes of the family toward the mentally ill patient?
In this article the attitudes towards mental illness in those families who have mentally ill members is presented in order to compare them with those found 25 years before in a similar research. In order to carry out the survey we used Struening and Cohen's Opinion about Mental Illness (OMI) questionnaire. adapted for use in Spain by Yllá and Guimón (1979). The population studied were the families associations of the mentally ill persons suffering from sychotic and affective disturbance. alcoholism and Alzheimer's dementia; the control group was made up of a number of Civil Servants and another section of health care workers. The samples were collected at random among the associated members. For the study we undertook a factorial analysis of the answers. The first five factors contain the greater part of the accumulated variation. that is to say 34.2%. 19 factors explain the whole 100% of the variation. The five principle factors are: (i) Mental hygiene (14% of the variation). (ii) therapeutic negativism (7% of the variation). (iii) Social reinsertion (4.87% of the variation). which was also similar to the following factor. (iv) social rehabilitation. and (v) authoritarism (3.62% of the variation). The extensive knowledge of these illnesses and a close relationship with those who are ill could be the cause of the large and diverse opinions and that some attitudes are more complex nowadays. According to these five principle factors we can see that the controls are appreciably less authoritarian and restrictive than that of the families of these ill people and that the attitudes vary depending on the age. profession and diagnosis of the illness.