[Comparison of the attitudes of Brazilian and Spanish medical students towards mental disease].

The purpose of this study was to compare the attitudes towards mental illness held by Brazilian and Spanish medical students. These attitudes were measured by means of the Opinions about Mental Illness Scale (OMI), developed by Cohen and Struening in 1962 in the United States, and translated and adapted by Rodrigues in 1983. The scale was answered by 214 5th year students of the School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil (61), and of the School of Medicine of Salamanca, Spain (147), and the data were analysed through the transformation of the raw scores to seten scores. From the seven attitudinal dimensions yielded by the adapted OMI, the subjects showed significant differences in relation to the attitudes called Benevolence, Social Restrictiveness and Mental Effort Etiology. Other significant differences were also found when mean scores were grouped by respondents' sex and future medical specialization.