Students are known for experiencing depression, especially during exams and term papers. The students who are the most affected by depression are medical students. Many other studies before this one proved that students experience depression and even suicidal thoughts.
This new research focused on medical students and the way they feel. They discovered that 1 in 10 med students experience suicidal thoughts and have developed depression. In order to conduct this study, researchers analyzed students from more than 45 countries.
Researchers analyzed different studies that were published since January 1963 up to September 2015. These studies involved almost 130,000 medical students from more than 45 countries. This recent study found that almost 30% of med students experience depression symptoms and more than 10% have suicidal thoughts. These numbers are concerning.
Another thing that is very concerning is the fact that less than 20% of those who were diagnosed with depression followed a treatment. This means that the rest of them ignored the specialist’s advice and continued to experience more depression symptoms.
The researchers mentioned that they were expecting this kind of result because many doctors experience depression even after they finished med school. They mentioned that this is an open secret for med students.
The worst part is that in some of these cases, people even commit suicide because they don’t benefit from any treatment for their condition. Once depression is getting worse, suicidal thoughts appear and after that, people can even commit suicide.
Researchers said that some of the factors that affect medical students are stress and anxiety. Both of them are caused by the fact that medical school is very competitive and people need to work hard in order to finish their studies.
One of the solutions to this problem is to change some things in the curricula of med schools and also change the student evaluation procedure. These small things might help students experience less stress and anxiety during exams.
This study is important because it might be an important step into finding out the cause for the depression that medical residents experience. Medical profesionals mentioned that not only students experience depression, those who graduated feel the same way, too. A study which was published last year showed that more than 25% of new doctors battle depression.
Image source: Wikipedia