Abstract
IntroductionMedical education can be stressful and a source of psychiatric morbidity for medical students with the potential of causing serious professional and personal negative consequences. With the limited studies investigating this issue in Sudan, this study aimed at assessing psychiatric morbidity, determine stressors, evaluate mental health care seeking behavior and barriers to seeking help among medical students in Khartoum, Sudan.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study with data collection for a period of one month, during the survey. Following ethical clearance and administrative approval, 644 students who gave consent were selected randomly from the university of Khartoum’s faculty of medicine. The “12-General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12)” was used as a tool to assess prevalence of psychiatric morbidity, determine stressors and evaluate barriers to seeking mental health care among students for a period of a month.ResultsThe overall prevalence of psychiatric morbidity was 56% (n = 356). The mean score of the GHQ12 was 6.7. There was a statistically significant association between GHQ12-score and level of study (in medical school), age, student’s income (student financial allowance). Stressors mostly experienced by students were fear of academic failure, dissatisfaction with academic performance and examination stress. The most frequent barriers to seeking mental health care elicited by participants were fear of stigmatization 63% (n = 401), preference for dealing with the problem alone 60% (n = 379), fear of the unknown 59% (n = 365) and failure to recognize symptoms 58% (n = 366).ConclusionPsychiatric morbidity is commonly experienced by students in medical school as can be seen from the high prevalence (56%). The reported high figures of psychiatric morbidity among medical school students points to the urgency for interventions to address this problem with potential for negative sequelae (personal and professional). Our findings suggest that interventions to improve the social and economic conditions of students in medical school as well as addressing stigma related to mental health and educating students to recognize signs and symptoms of psychiatric morbidity while making help accessible might go a long way to address this challenge.
Highlights
Mental health disorders according to the World Health Organization (WHO) are one of the leading causes of disability worldwide
Medical students are experiencing wide variety of stressors in medical school and the most burdening are those related to academic performance requirements and outcomes
Low figures of students' seeking mental health care before with high reported figures of barriers perceived by students which are mostly related to issues of public stigmatization, tendency to rely on self for handling such problems or accessibility as well as provider's knowledge and trust barriers
Summary
Mental health disorders according to the World Health Organization (WHO) are one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. In particular has been recognized as a stressful experience with medical students highly subjected to stressful conditions that exerts a negative effect on their academic performance, physical health and psychological wellbeing [2,3,4]. The demanding academic requirement of being a medical professional, the nature of the disciplines' tasks and environment that expose students to the suffering of patients and deaths, coupled with the workload and the required quality of the educational process are all risk factors that are found to create stress and negatively impact students' mental well-being [5, 6]. Despite the general expectation to have better access to mental health care, medical students are less likely to receive proper mental care because of barriers of time availability, cost, inappropriateness of the available mental care, stigmatization and even students failure to recognize their own mental and psychiatric problems [7]
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