Abstract
More mental morbidities were reported in medical students than their nonmedical peers, which may negatively influence their lives and future career. The aim of this study was to assess the mental health status among medical students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. Two hundred and eight 1(st) to 4(th) year Medical students took part in this cross-sectional study. General Health Questionnaire with 28 items (GHQ-28) was used for data collection. We performed descriptive statistics, Mann Whitney U test, one way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc and Kruskal Wallis H and Chi square test for statistical analysis. The mean age of participants was 20.70 ± 1.14 (mean ± SD) years. More than half of them (54.4%) had total GHQ score above the cut-off point considered as probably abnormal mental health status. Years of education, positive family history and low satisfaction of the medicine discipline affected their mental health. Third and fourth year students had significantly higher mean scores of total GHQ (p-value = 0.009) and anxiety, somatic and social subscales (p-value = 0.001, 0.004 and 0.026). Students with positive family history of mental illness and low satisfaction of field of the study significantly had higher GHQ scores (p-value = 0.012 and < 0.001 respectively). Poor mental health prevalence is high among medical students in Shiraz. Proper changes in educational programs and other effective interventions to raise the students' satisfaction may reduce the effect of other stress reasons and improve their mental health status.
Highlights
Mental health in medical students is a noteworthy issue due to their exposure to several stress factors during the medicine education years
Higher frequency of mental morbidity such as depression and anxiety and higher levels of psychological distress were seen in medical students in comparison to general population, increasing with the years of training. [1]
The sample size was calculated to be 240 and the participants were medical students of preclinical training years selected by stratified random sampling, who were administered the Persian version of General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28)
Summary
Mental health in medical students is a noteworthy issue due to their exposure to several stress factors during the medicine education years. Higher frequency of mental morbidity such as depression and anxiety and higher levels of psychological distress were seen in medical students in comparison to general population, increasing with the years of training. A study in Vanderbilt University showed that anxiety and depression were more prevalent among medical students in comparison to other students of nonmedical disciplines and there were significantly higher rates of possibility of alcohol abuse and eating disorders. Similar study in Iran reported that close to 50 percent of the medical students had ill mental health based on General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) score and there were significantly different scores due to age, gender and level of education. A study in Vanderbilt University showed that anxiety and depression were more prevalent among medical students in comparison to other students of nonmedical disciplines and there were significantly higher rates of possibility of alcohol abuse and eating disorders. [14]
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