Physiotherapy students' perceptions of managing patients with mental illness: A qualitative exploration at a South African university.
Maylene Salo, Farhana Karachi, Danelle Hess and 1 others
Sixteen South African physiotherapy students described feeling unprepared to manage patients with mental illness.
Their knowledge came from personal experience and social media rather than structured training, and they were uncertain about what physiotherapy's role should be when mental illness complicates rehabilitation.
Key findings
1Students' understanding of mental illness was pieced together from personal experience, social media, podcasts, and high-school lessons rather than from the physiotherapy curriculum, which they described as limited and easily forgotten.
2Students consistently reported a gap between what their training prepared them to do and what they encountered on clinical placements, with psychology content taught in years one and two having faded or felt too abstract by the time they met patients with mental illness.
3Students were uncertain about physiotherapy's role when mental illness complicates rehabilitation; some did not know what the physiotherapist's role was at all, and their contribution often defaulted to reassurance, empathy, and referral.
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What it does not show
Single university in South Africa; findings reflect one curriculum and one clinical context and may not transfer to other institutions or countries. Sixteen participants is a small sample; while the authors report data saturation, the range of perspectives is necessarily narrow. The researcher was a clinical educator at the time of data analysis, which the authors acknowledge as a potential source of bias, mitigated by reflexivity and supervisory review. Only one student was used to pilot the interview guide, which the authors note as a minor limitation. This is a study of perceptions and experiences, not of patient outcomes or measurable competence; it tells you what students felt, not whether their care was suboptimal. All participants were from the same programme at the same institution, so the findings describe one curricular structure rather than a generalisable gap.
Declared interests
The authors state that the research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. No conflicts of interest are declared.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →