Abstract
(1) Background: The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of medical students in Portugal in the period after returning to face-to-face classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the 2020/2021 academic year. (2) Methods: We conducted an observational, descriptive, and cross-sectional study, between December 2020 and February 2021 with a representative sample of Portuguese medical students (n = 649), applying an anonymous questionnaire which was composed by a sociodemographic characterization, The Brief Symptoms Inventory–18, The Fear of COVID-19 Scale and the Negative Impact Assessment Scale. For statistical processing, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS ©) was used. (3) Results: 65.3% of participants said that self-perceived relevant anxiety symptoms, and around 10% said that they had a physical or a mental illness diagnosis. Significant differences (p < 0.05) were found for Fear of COVID-19, Somatization, Anxiety and Overall Mental Health, indicating that women, students from the 1st and last years of training had higher scores. Age, year of training, Fear of COVID-19 and Negative Impact of COVID-19 were significant predictors of overall mental health. (4) Conclusion: In our sample of Portuguese medical students, age, year of training, but mostly fear of COVID-19 and the negative impact of COVID-19 contributed to mental health symptoms.
Highlights
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a major impact on the world population, both in terms of its morbidity and mortality rates and as for its social and economic impact
As main results of the study we highlight: (1) The sample mean in the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) is lower than in the scale validation sample [35]; (2) Means of the Depression and Anxiety subscales of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18) were higher than those found in the Portuguese samples [39]; (3) With regard to gender, females scored higher on Fear of COVID-19, Somatization, Anxiety and Overall Mental Health
This value indicates that our sample experienced, on average, fewer feelings of fear regarding the topic of COVID-19 than the sample in the validation study
Summary
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a major impact on the world population, both in terms of its morbidity and mortality rates and as for its social and economic impact. In addition to the problems directly caused by the virus, psychosomatic symptoms involving fear and anxiety about being infected and infecting others are potentially worrying, justifying studies on the incidence of mental health symptoms, in the general population, and in subgroups of the population. Since the health sector was one of the most affected by this pandemic, in addition to the structural changes inherent to the containment of the pandemic, an overload of work among health professionals was widely observed [1]. Medical students as future health professionals are being directly and indirectly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The anticipation of a painful future in terms of work-related conditions, hardened in part by the pandemic, as well as the adaptation to university programs to the pandemic itself, could be potential causes of anxiety and other mental health problems among medical students [2]
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