Accepted for/Published in: JMIRx Med
Date Submitted: Feb 23, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 23, 2021 - Apr 20, 2021
Date Accepted: Jul 13, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 4, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Impact on Mental Health of students due to restriction caused by COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
COVID-19 pandemic have created panic among the students due to restrictions, rise of infection in society, death of people around them, etc. This panic have led to the strong mental impact on them, showing the symptoms of fear, anxiety and depression.
Objective:
The primary aim of the study was to investigate fear, depression and anxiety symptoms among students of India due to COVID-19 pandemic and its restriction. The secondary aim of this study is to validate (Concurrent validity) the fear of COVID-19 scale with brief patient heath Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD-7) respectively.
Methods:
The cross-sectional web-based research was conducted between mid-November and mid-December 2020 with the objective of understanding the psychological and behavioral consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic effect on students due to the constraint of forced control. The questionnaire included a) socio-demographic questions and b) psychometric scales evaluating the psychological and behavioral impact caused by COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions.
Results:
Total number of 324 students participated in this study in which 44.4% were male and 55.6% were female. Fear of COVID-19 scale showed 68.8% of students had high fear, 24.4% had moderate to severe depression and 51.5% had moderate to severe anxiety. The correlation of fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19s) with Generalized Anxiety scale (GAD-7) and brief patient health questionnaire scale (PHQ-9) was found to be 0.492 and 0.474 respectively.
Conclusions:
This research concludes that there is a very strong fear of COVID-19 among students, along with anxiety and depression symptoms. This study also concludes that the fear of the COVID-19 scale has strong positive correlation with the anxiety (GAD-7) and depression (PHQ-9) scales.
Citation
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Copyright
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