Original title: Investigating Mental Health of US College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Survey Study
Researchers surveyed undergraduate and graduate students at Texas A&M University during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students answered standard questionnaires that measure depression and anxiety, along with questions about pandemic stress and coping. Among the 2,031 participants, 48.14% showed moderate-to-severeA symptom level that falls in the moderate or severe range on the survey's scoring scale. depression and 38.48% showed moderate-to-severe anxiety. The survey also found that 18.04% reported suicidal thoughts, and fewer than half said they could cope adequately.
Imagine asking people in a university dining hall how they are feeling on one particular day. Some report feeling fine, while others say they are struggling, but the answers come only from the people who chose to respond. In this paper, the dining hall is the university student group, and the answers are survey responses about mental health during the pandemic. They show what respondents reported, not what every student experienced or what caused those feelings.
College students were dealing with academic, health, and lifestyle concerns, and many respondents said their stress or anxiety had increased. Understanding these pressures can help universities identify where students may need support, though this survey alone cannot show what every student experienced.
The survey recruited students by email from Texas A&M University, so the results do not establish what all US college students experienced. Because it collected responses at one point in time, it cannot show how mental health changed or prove that the pandemic caused the reported symptoms. The abstract does not report whether respondents differed from students who did not participate.
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Investigating Mental Health of US College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Survey Study — Xiaomei Wang, Sudeep Hegde, Changwon Son et al. — Journal of Medical Internet Research — doi:10.2196/22817
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.