The student mental health crisis: Assessing psychiatric and developmental explanatory models
| Autor: | Robert Andersen, James E. Côté, Anders Holm |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Male
medicine.medical_specialty Canada Social Psychology Universities media_common.quotation_subject Identity (social science) 050109 social psychology Developmental and Educational Psychology medicine Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Psychiatry Students media_common Operationalization 05 social sciences medicine.disease Mental health Psychiatry and Mental health Distress Cross-Sectional Studies Mental Health Mood disorders Feeling Pediatrics Perinatology and Child Health Anxiety Female medicine.symptom Psychology Identity formation 050104 developmental & child psychology |
| Zdroj: | Journal of adolescence. 86 |
| ISSN: | 1095-9254 |
| Popis: | Introduction Student mental health problems are now commonly understood using a psychiatric model in which diagnosed anxiety and mood disorders are viewed to be so widespread as to constitute a crisis. Less attention is given to the role of developmental processes, such as identity formation and purpose, in understanding the types of distress current university students can experience. We fill this void by simultaneously assessing the effectiveness of both psychiatric and developmental variables in predicting how often students feel emotional distress in the form of frequently feeling too anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed to study. Methods Binary logit models were fitted to online survey data collected from a cross-sectional, nation-wide sample of 1010 Canadian full-time university students aged 18 to 24 (63% female). Results Our findings confirm that the psychiatric and developmental models both explain variance in academic distress. We also found that a developmental model operationalized using key measures of identity formation and purpose significantly accounted for academic distress, over and above variance explained by psychiatric diagnoses. In other words, not only do many students with a psychiatric diagnosis experience distress linked to problems with identity/purpose that interferes with studying, but so do a considerable proportion of students without any diagnosis. This impact persists after controlling for a host of variables assessing demographic/family background, academic preparation and performance, and a number of factors believed to aggravate emotional distress. Conclusions Universities can respond to the mental health crisis by approaching some forms of distress as developmental problems associated with identity and purpose. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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