Port Harcourt 

Mental illness or disorder is a psychological factor reflected in the behaviour, which affects the normal development of a person’s culture. The study is aimed at assessing the perception of mental illness among Undergraduate Medical Laboratory Science students of Rivers State University, Nkpolu Port Harcourt. The study adopted a descriptive cross-sectional design and structured questionnaires were used to collect data from Medical Laboratory Science students of Rivers State University. A population of 172 and a sample size of 120 was gotten using the Taro Yameni formular and this was achieved using the simple random sampling technique. Also, a reliability value of 0.94 was obtained using the Cronbach Alpha Correlation Test. A structured questionnaire was developed according to the objectives of the study to guide in the generation of information. A descriptive analysis was done, expressing data and results on tables, frequencies and percentages for dichotomous variables, and as mean with standard deviation (SD) for continuous variables and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 20.0) was used for all analyses. As obtained from the result, all the participants who were recruited for this study acknowledged that they have heard about mental illness. The respondents went further to indicate their sources of mental health information. It was seen that formal education (120) had the highest frequency, this followed by the environment (83) and social media (65) being the least mode of information. This study also showed that there are misconceptions and myths about the causes of mental disorder, stigmatization of mentally ill persons and poor perception of mental disorder. The study recommended that awareness campaign aimed at correcting these misconceptions and negative stereotyping of mentally ill patients should be embarked upon by government and non-governmental organizations including traditional and religious institutions in protecting the rights and privileges of mentally ill persons.