Prevalence and severity of psychological problems in university students

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study recruited 4799 university students to complete a Spanish language version of Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure and an ad hoc questionnaire to determine the presence and severity of psychological problems and identify potential explanatory factors. The percentage of participants who exceeded the cut-off point for consideration as a clinical population ranged from 4.3% on the Risk scale to 63.3% on the Well-being scale. Differences by gender and academic subject area were observed for all the scales, but associated effect sizes were very low. The five variables that showed the most predictive power were having a poor relationship with living companions, psychological problems that required medical attention, poor self-perception of academic performance, taking tranquilisers without a prescription and believing that recreational use of new technologies had negatively affected academic performance.