Abstract
This study aims to know and analyze university students' social representations on the psychiatric reform and on mentally ill people, relating them to their adhesion to attention to mental health paradigms. 480 Psychology, Medicine and Nursing university students participated in this research, most of them females (74.4%) and with average age of 24 years (SD = 5.98). Data were collected through the Scale of Attitudes in Mental Health and the Technique of Free Association of Words. Results revealed ambiguous comprehension of the psychiatric reform. University students demonstrated to know practices of this new model and presented higher adhesion to psychosocial paradigms, but a representation of the mentally ill person marked by fear and exclusion and linked to biomedical paradigm was observed. Such finding seems to reflect the present situation in the mental health field, in which the biomedical paradigm was not totally overcome nor the psychosocial paradigm totally established.
Keywords:
psychiatric reform; college students; social representation
