Mental health status of high school students impacted by COVID-19<sub-title>A latest MSSMHS-60 investigation to 626 Dongguan high school students

Abstract

As the normalization of the COVID-19 epidemic, trying to objectively present mental health status of high school students, to make comparisons with the history data for developing changes and to analyze how the epidemic been affected, the investigation has adopted stratified random sampling methods by randomly selected 5 classes from each grade of a Dongguan high School. Total 15 classes of 626 students participated and been evaluated by filling the questionnaire "Mental Health Scale for Middle School Students (MSSMHS-60)". 582 valid inputs were collected as the database, using SPSS 23.0 to carry out descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA with the relevant 2019 historical data from Chen Dan Beijing Youth Legal and Psychological Counseling Service Center for comparisons. The investigation and statistical results indicated: the overall mental health level of high school students have demonstrated an obvious negative trend during the COVID-19 epidemic, the latest problem detection rate 39.86% is much higher than 26.3% in 2019. Among all the factors, "Study Pressure", "Emotional Volatility" and "Anxiety" ranked the top three mental health problems. The mental health status of boys seems better than girls, while the mental health status of students in Grade One is better than students in Grade Three. The mental health status of students in Grade Three is the most critical, which manifested in serious problems on "Study pressure", "Anxiety" and "Emotional Fluctuation" factors.