Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jan 12, 2021
Date Accepted: Aug 1, 2021
Understanding The Social Determinants Of Mental Health Of The Undergraduate Students In Bangladesh: Interview Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental health of the undergraduate students in Bangladesh is an understudied topic. The overall condition of mental health facilities and services in Bangladesh is very poor and demands serious attention.
Objective:
The objective of this study is to identify the social determinants of mental health of the undergraduate students in Bangladesh, and observe the effectiveness of a reflective tool to record and reflect on their interactions with friends, family members, and academic or professional correspondences.
Methods:
We recruited 22 undergraduate students from three universities in Bangladesh. We deployed an android application to help them describe their mood after each conversation and later reflect on those descriptions. We also conducted two semi-structured interviews with the participants before and after using the app.
Results:
Our results show that academics, family, job and economic condition, romantic relationship, and religion are the major social determinants of mental health of the undergraduate students in Bangladesh. Our app helped the participants pinpoint the specific issues related to these factors. Although our app does not provide any explicit recommendation, participants took certain steps on their own to improve their mental health.
Conclusions:
Overall, the findings from this study would provide better insights for the researchers to design better solutions to help the younger population from this part of the world regarding their mental health issues.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.