Mental Health Status among the South Indian Pharmacy Students during Covid-19 Pandemic’s Quarantine Period: A Cross-Sectional Study

  1. S Vidyadhara
  2. A Chakravarthy
  3. A Pramod Kumar
  4. C Sri Harsha
  5. R Rahul

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Abstract

Introduction

The COVID-19 outbreak created a major panic among all the citizens of the country owing to its severity, contagiousness within the community, lack of specific treatment and possibility of re-infection. All these factors along with the uncertain behaviour of the virus lead to state of fear and concern all throught out the nation. The current study represents the mental health survey conducted on the students of South Indiaafter the completion of one month quarantine period of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Methodology

The present study is a cross-sectional, web-based online survey which consists of 21-item DASS questionnaire. Thiswas used to assess the emotional states of depression, anxiety, and stress. Using Google Forms, the questionnaire was randomly distributed among the pharmacy students of selected colleges. Mean with standard deviation was calculated for continuous variables and the number with percentage was calculated for categorical variables.

Results

A total of 500 participants responded to the questionnaire. More than half of the responses were received from females (65%). On assessment it was found that, 26 % of respondents reported severe to extremely severe depressive symptoms; 31.5 % of respondents reported severe to extremely severe anxiety symptoms, and 19 % reported severe to extremely severe stress levels.

Conclusion

In India during the outbreak of COVID-19, an alarming number of students were found to have an impact on mental health due to the outbreak and were observed to have higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. The study findings shows the need of conducting more such studies and can be used to prepare appropriate psychological interventions to improvemental health among the young public during the pandemic.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.08.20093708: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    This study has a few limitations: The resources available are limited in this period and we have adopted the snowball sampling strategy for collecting the data. As a result, huge data was not collected; the conclusion was less generalizable to the entire population, particularly less diverse young public. One more limitation of the study is that self-reported levels of anxiety, depression, and stress may not always be aligned with the assessment done by trained health professionals. The study also did not assess the risk factors which might have contributed for alteration of the mental health status. This study provides important information about the respondents on the psychological responses of 4 weeks after the outbreak of COVID-19. Our study findings directly inform the need for the developing and implementing the strategies of several psychological interventions that may help minimizing anxiety, depression, and stress during the outbreak of COVID-19. As the COVID-19 epidemic, which is still ongoing at the time of communicating this manuscript, all the interventions developed will be helpful in large extent to Indian youth.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.08.20093708v1 on medRxiv