Abstract

Background: Mental distress is defined as unpleasant mental or emotional state, often impairing one’s ability to cope with day-to-day living. The undergraduate medical training is a stressful period and medical students undergo tremendous stress during various stages of the MBBS course.

Aims and Objective: The objective was to study the prevalence of mental distress among the undergraduate students of medical college and to find out the correlation between mental distress and different explanatory variables among the study population.

Materials and Methods: It was a cross-sectional study carried out on 339 undergraduate medical students (208 females and 131 males). We used a self-reporting questionnaire (SRQ-20) for the assessment of mental distress and correlated that with different explanatory variables.

Results: Mental distress is more in second-year students, in female students as compared to male students, hostellers as compared to day scholars, students of rural background, and students who have repeated attempts in premedical entrance examination.

Conclusion: Mental distress is common among medical students. The negative effects of long and tiring medical education on the psychological status of students have been shown in several studies. With early identification and effective psychological services, possible future illnesses may be prevented. As the study findings showed a high level of stress among the second-year students, we suggest supporting them and taking care of this group by the student support system. This will also help them cope well with stress in the later years. It is very important to target stress-prevention strategies at students who have any level of psychological stress to prevent the development of more serious conditions relating to stress.

Key words: Mental Distress; Self-reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20); Undergraduate Students; Psychological; Explanatory Variables