A study of mental distress in medical students

Abstract

||ABSTRACT Background: Mental distress is defined as unpleasant mental or emotional state, often impairing one's ability to cope with day-to-day living. The undergraduate medical training is a stressful period and medical students undergo tremendous stress during various stages of the MBBS course. Aims and Objective: The objective was to study the prevalence of mental distress among the undergraduate students of medical college and to find out the correlation between mental distress and different explanatory variables among the study population. Materials and Methods: It was a cross-sectional study carried out on 339 undergraduate medical students (208 females and 131 males). We used a self-reporting questionnaire (SRQ-20) for the assessment of mental distress and correlated that with different explanatory variables. Results: Mental distress is more in second-year students, in female students as compared to male students, hostellers as compared to day scholars, students of rural background, and students who have repeated attempts in premedical entrance examination. Conclusion: Mental distress is common among medical students. The negative effects of long and tiring medical education on the psychological status of students have been shown in several studies. With early identification and effective psychological services, possible future illnesses may be prevented. As the study findings showed a high level of stress among the second-year students, we suggest supporting them and taking care of this group by the student support system. This will also help them cope well with stress in the later years. It is very important to target stress-prevention strategies at students who have any level of psychological stress to prevent the development of more serious conditions relating to stress.

Stress, Anxiety and Depression among a Cohort of Health Sciences Undergraduate Students: The Prevalence and Risk Factors

“…In addition, the results of this study showed that the students’ academic year was significantly associated with stress. Similar findings were reported in studies conducted in Punjab, India, and Southern Ethiopia in which the likelihood of developing stress became lower as the students advanced in their years of study [ 42 , 43 ]. A possible reason for this would be the self-adjustment to face the challenges encountered by the junior freshmen in terms of the new environment and academic challenges besides separation from family members and friends.…”

<p>Mental Distress and Associated Factors Among Undergraduate Engineering Students of Hawassa University, Ethiopia</p>

“…43 Unlike other previous studies; year of study, scoring lower grades and having financial problems statistically has no significant association with mental distress. [23][24][25]44 This can be because of the variation in the study population, and we conducted our study only among engineering students; the result may not be conclusive to all students attending higher Ethiopian institutions. Nevertheless, our study shows the current status of mental distress among engineering students, which can be generalised to institutions of similar setups in Ethiopia and this finding may benefit the EMoH in suggesting a plan of re-evaluating higher education student deployment policy and encourages researchers to develop a robust study to improve mental distress among undergraduate engineering students.…”

Magnitude of Mental Distress and its Determinants Among Medical and Health Science Regular Undergraduate Students at Jimma University: Institutional Based Cross-Sectional Study

“…Although mental distress affect any one numerous studies reported that high burden of mental distress found in university students compared to the other general population (3,4), despite that its burden varies considerably from nation to nation or country to country according to previous studies finding, the magnitude of mental distress at French was 25.7% in first-year university students (5), in Australian 67.4% (6), in America 82% preexisting social support (19,(22)(23)(24)(25).…”