Abstract

Background: Medical education, since its very beginning has been stressful for all those who are involved in it, directly or indirectly. This brings about the development of anxiety or depression or both among the medical students as well as aggravation of the same among those who already have them for some other reason. The apparent factors behind the condition may be a few but an in-depth analysis may reveal several inapparent yet significant factors behind an individual student’ anxious or depressed behavior.
Objective: (1) To assess the level of mental well-being among the medical students, (2) to assess reasons for anxiety/ depression/somatic symptoms/social dysfunction among the medical students, and (3) to correlate the mental well-being with the sociodemographic factors.
Materials and Methods: It was a cross-sectional study. The study was conducted among all the students and interns of Index Medical College, Hospital & Research Centre, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. General Health Questionnaire-28 (GHQ-28) was administered to all the students and the responses were recorded. Result: The data so recorded were analyzed using MS-Excel 2010 and SPSS 20.0. All the volunteering students and interns were included in the study. Mean age of students was 21.35 ± 1.35 years. The results show a significant level of anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms, and social dysfunction among the medical students with an overall prevalence of 66.13%. Except sex and academic failure, all the other studied variables were found to be significantly associated with mental well-being. There was a difference in the pattern of mental health among students of various professional years with interns having poorest status, the prevalence being 89.3%. Conclusion: The overall results indicate toward a necessity of urgent and firm action regarding the mental dimension of health of the future medical professionals of the nation.