Mental health knowledge among student teachers.

A four-item questionnaire was administered to 180 student teachers to assess their mental health knowledge. Students over-estimated the number of those requiring help from a mental hospital, but their estimates of those needing life-long institutionalization and incarceration were reasonable. Females gave consistently higher estimates than males, although both sexes were ascribed incidence figures not significantly different from each other. These results suggest needed improvement in the mental health education of teachers. It will be difficult to influence their classroom practice without first affecting their attitudes and this, in turn, is difficult to achieve when little, or at best inaccurate, information is imparted in teacher preparation.