title: Addressing nursing students' stigmatizing beliefs toward mental illness.
abstract: Implementing teaching methods that address nursing students' stigmatizing beliefs toward people with mental illness is important for nurse educators. The purpose of this article is to describe how a creative reflective learning project was used to encourage nursing students to express feelings about working with clients with mental illness, address stigma, and facilitate development of empathy. While working with a client with mental illness over a 4-week period, students maintained a reflective journal exploring their assumptions about mental illness. In addition, students created an individual project to depict their understanding of what it was like for their client to live with a mental illness. Examples of students' reflections and descriptions of their projects are presented to demonstrate how this experience affected students' views of mental illness.
authors.affiliation: Salisbury University Depatment of Nursing, 1101 Camden Avenue, Salisbury, MD 21801, USA. dawebster@salisbury.edu
authors.forename: Debra A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Webster
mesh_terms: D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003405:Creativity; D003469:Culture; D003479:Curriculum; D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D008396:Maryland; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000451:nursing*; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D011287:Prejudice; D013338:Students, Nursing / Q000523:psychology*