Mental health of med students worse during postgrad exams, rebounded after 6 months

The mental health of medical students in China was significantly worse during postgraduate entrance examinations compared with 6 months after, according to a study published in BMC Psychiatry.

“In China, the postgraduate entrance examination refers to students with certain conditions to take the national master’s degree examination to pursue a master’s degree,” Fajiang Chen, of the Graduate School at Guangzhou Medical University in China, and colleagues wrote. “To increase their competitive employment advantage, the postgraduate entrance examination has become a choice for college students to improve their self-worth.”

Chen and colleagues sought to investigate the mental health status of medical students during the postgraduate application entrance examination for Guangzhou Medical University and to provide a foundation for mental health education and psychological counseling.

With the Symptom Checklist-90 scale (SCL-90) questionnaire, researchers assessed the mental health status of 613 students who passed two rounds of the Postgraduate Entrance Examination in March 2019 to enroll in Guangzhou. The same population were evaluated and followed up for retesting 6 months later. A five-point Likert scale was employed to evaluate scoring, with a higher factor score indicating lower mental health level. SPSS 20.0 statistical software was employed for comparative analysis, including One-Sample T-Test, Independent-Samples T-Test, Paired Samples T-Test and Chi-square Test.

Results showed that 74 of 613 participants (12.07%) had mental health problems during the postgraduate entrance examination, with a positive detection rate for mental health issues at 12.1. At the 6-month follow-up, the number of participants with mental health problems declined sharply to 27 of 613 (4.4%), while positive detection rate also saw a steep decline to 4.4%. Somatization was the most significant symptom of the students both during and after the postgraduate entrance examination stages.

Researchers additionally found that all SCL-90 factors were scored significantly lower both in and after the postgraduate entrance examination stages than the 2008 national college student norm score. Excluding psychiatric factors, all other SCL-90 factors in the postgraduate entrance examination stage scored higher than the graduate stage, and the total score of SCL-90 in female medical students was higher compared with male students.

“The postgraduate entrance examination event has a significant negative influence on students’ mental health,” Chen and colleagues wrote. “Therefore, educating applicants about mental health should be implemented during the postgraduate entrance examination.”