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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO257

The impact of a clinical psychiatry clerkship on mental health stigma and gender differences among Moroccan medical students

IMPACT OF CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY ROTATION ON MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA AND GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES AMONG MOROCCAN MEDICAL STUDENTS

The clinical psychiatry clerkship significantly reduced stigma among medical students of both genders and eliminated the baseline gender difference.

The study aimed to assess stigma toward mental illness and baseline gender differences among Moroccan medical students, and to examine whether a clinical psychiatry clerkship reduced overall stigma and altered these gender differences. This was a single-center prospective study conducted at Ibn Nafis Psychiatric Hospital, Mohammed VI University Hospital in Marrakesh; 193 fifth-year students participated between February and June 2025. Attitudes were measured before and after the clerkship using the MICA-2 (Mental Illness: Clinicians' Attitudes Scale), with higher scores indicating more stigmatizing attitudes. Participants had a mean age of 23 ± 1.2 years, and 67% were women. At baseline, male students had higher stigma scores than female students (51 ± 7 vs. 48 ± 6.8; p = 0.02). Following the clerkship (n = 178 according to the abstract), scores decreased significantly in both groups (p < 0.001), with a similar magnitude of reduction: 7.6 ± 7.0 MICA-2 points among men and 8.1 ± 7.2 among women, with a between-group difference of p = 0.68. The baseline gender difference was no longer significant after the clerkship (p = 0.41). Item-level analysis showed that the highest baseline stigma concerned perceptions of psychiatry as less prestigious and discomfort with working with patients with mental illness. In conclusion, a clinical psychiatry clerkship reduces stigma regardless of gender and eliminates the baseline gender difference; targeting the highly stigmatizing beliefs identified at baseline may further strengthen educational interventions.

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