Mental Health Problems in University Students: A Prevalence Study

A survey of mental health problems of university students was carried out on 1850 participants in the age range 19-26 years. An indigenous Student Problem Checklist (SPCL) developed by Mahmood & Saleem, (2011), 45 items is a rating scale, designed to determine the prevalence rate of mental health problem among university students. This scale relates to four dimensions of mental health problems as reported by university students, such as: Sense of Being Dysfunctional, Loss of Confidence, Lack of self Regulation and Anxiety Proneness. For interpretation of the overall SPCL score, the authors suggest that scores falling above one SD should be considered as indicative of severe problems, where as score about 2 SD represent very severe problems. Our finding show that 31% of the participants fall in the "severe" category, whereas 16% fall in the "very severe" category. As far as the individual dimensions are concerned, 17% respondents comprising sample of the present study fall in very severe category Sense of Being Dysfunctional, followed by Loss of Confidence (16%), Lack of Self Regulation (14%) and Anxiety Proneness (12%). These findings are in lying with similar other studies on mental health of students. The role of variables like sample characteristics, the measure used, cultural and contextual factors are discussed in determining rates as well as their implications for student counseling service in prevention and intervention.