Assessment of Mental Health among Iranian Medical Students: A Cross-Sectional Study.

OBJECTIVES More mental morbidities were reported in medical students than their nonmedical peers, which may negatively influence their lives and future career. The aim of this study was to assess the mental health status among medical students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. METHOD Two hundred and eight 1(st) to 4(th) year Medical students took part in this cross-sectional study. General Health Questionnaire with 28 items (GHQ-28) was used for data collection. We performed descriptive statistics, Mann Whitney U test, one way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc and Kruskal Wallis H and Chi square test for statistical analysis. RESULTS The mean age of participants was 20.70 ± 1.14 (mean ± SD) years. More than half of them (54.4%) had total GHQ score above the cut-off point considered as probably abnormal mental health status. Years of education, positive family history and low satisfaction of the medicine discipline affected their mental health. Third and fourth year students had significantly higher mean scores of total GHQ (p-value = 0.009) and anxiety, somatic and social subscales (p-value = 0.001, 0.004 and 0.026). Students with positive family history of mental illness and low satisfaction of field of the study significantly had higher GHQ scores (p-value = 0.012 and < 0.001 respectively). CONCLUSION Poor mental health prevalence is high among medical students in Shiraz. Proper changes in educational programs and other effective interventions to raise the students' satisfaction may reduce the effect of other stress reasons and improve their mental health status.