Stigma towards mental illness and psychiatry have a major impact on psychiatric patients’ quality of life; in particular, prejudicial beliefs make it more difficult for future doctors to send patients to mental health services, leading to a delay of necessary care.

Our aim is to evaluate the stigma towards mental illness and psychiatry, in a sample of Italian medical students. We studied the differences between the first-year students who have not attended the academic course in psychiatry, compared to the senior students who have attended the psychiatric lectures.

We tested 113 medical students, using the following questionnaires:

– Attitudes Towards Psychiatry (ATP 30);

– Community Attitudes Towards Mental Ill (CAMI);

– Perceived Discrimination Devaluation Scale (PDD), to assess the discrimination towards mental illness perceived in society;

– Baron-Cohen's Empathy Quotient (EQ), to measure empathy.

Among the 113 students, 46 have already attended the academic course of psychiatry and CAMI scores were less stigmatizing as total score (P = 0.014) and in authoritarianism subscale (P = 0.049), social restriction (P = 0.022) and ideology of mental health in the community (P = 0.017). However, there were no statistically significant differences in empathy, perceived discrimination in the society and stigmatization of psychiatry.

The 67 students who have not attended the academic course of psychiatry are more stigmatizing, considering psychiatric patients as inferior people that require coercive attitudes, socially dangerous and that should be treated faraway from the community. Studying psychiatry is therefore useful to reduce, in the future doctors, these prejudices toward mentally ill patients.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.