Abstract
BackgroundExtant literature reveals that medical students suffer from various mental health problems in the process of learning medicine. However, there are few studies evaluating the implementation of a mental health education course in medical curriculum. The current study aimed to test the effectiveness of an 8-week intensive mental health education course, the College Student Mental Health Education Course (CSMHEC), and to gain further insights on how the course could be improved from students’ feedback.MethodsThis is a quasi-experimental study with both quantitative and qualitative analyses. We recruited 374 first year medical students as our subjects with 188 (age = 17.97 ± 0.65 years, 37.2% male) for the experiment group and 186 (age = 18.02 ± 0.63 years, 40.3% male) for the control group. For quantitative analysis, Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21), Chinese College Student Academic Burnout Inventory (CCSABI) and Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) were used and a 5-point Likert scale was used to indicate students’ overall satisfaction with CSMHEC. For qualitative analysis, a thematic analysis method was adopted to gain insights from the feedback of medical students.ResultsMedical students in the experiment group saw a significant decline in psychological distress (p < 0.001, d = 0.31) and academic burnout (p < 0.001, d = 1.46), while they experienced a significant increase in life satisfaction levels after the intervention (p < 0.001, d = 0.48). Compared with students in the control group, students in the experiment group had statistically significant lower levels of psychological distress (p < 0.05, d = 0.23) and academic burnout (p < 0.001, d = 0.70), but statistically significant higher levels of life satisfaction in the post-test (p < 0.01, d = 0.31). Most students in the experiment group were satisfied with CSMHEC and themes extracted in the thematic analysis shed light on how the course could be improved.ConclusionsImplementing a mental health education course like CSMHEC in medical curriculum can be effective in helping medical students improve psychological health. More research needs to be conducted on further refinement and better design of such a course to implement in medical education.
Highlights
Extant literature reveals that medical students suffer from various mental health problems in the process of learning medicine
Comparisons of psychological variables in the experiment group before and after the intervention Figure 2b shows the levels of psychological variables in the experiment group before and after medical students took College Student Mental Health Education Course (CSMHEC), which were compared by paired samples t-tests
The results reveal that after taking CSMHEC, students in the experiment group had significantly lower levels of psychological distress (29.74 ± 7.09 vs 27.97 ± 6.92, t = 4.244, p < 0.001, d = 0.31) and significantly lower levels of academic burnout (51.16 ± 8.26 vs 42.85 ± 9.94, t = 19.997, p < 0.001, d = 1.46)
Summary
Extant literature reveals that medical students suffer from various mental health problems in the process of learning medicine. Medical education is known to be a long and painstaking process that requires hard work and continuous efforts. Such a demanding process may bring about various mental health problems like stress, anxiety, depression and burnout. These problems may lead to a set of serious consequences in medical students, such as poor academic performance [1], sleep disturbance [2], alcohol and drug abuse [3, 4], low self-worth [5] and even suicide [6,7,8]. As a healthy mental state is important for student well-being in general, which is essential for a medical student to succeed finishing study in medical university and become a qualified health professional thereafter, there is an urgent need to implement effective interventions early
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