The Association between Mental Health and Demographic Factors with Educational Success in the Students of Arak Universities

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Lack of mental health will prevent the progress and promotion of people and their responsibilities that due to educational drop out. Since educational drop out is one of the most important problems in the universities, so the present study was conducted to determine the association between mental health and other related factors with educational success.METHODS: This cross sectional study was performed in the 3rd semester of 2008 on 304 medical and non-medical students of Arak with two-stage sampling method. Students were divided into two groups of successful students with average grade above 15 and unsuccessful students with average grade below 15. Data was gathered with GHQ-28 questionnaire in four areas physical health, anxiety, social practice and depression. Total score of each participant varied from 0-84. Demographic data was collected by the questionnaire and then analyzed.FINDINGS: The mean score of general health of participants in the study was equal to 26.46±11.43. The results showed that a significant correlation between general health, physical health and depression scores with educational success (p<0.05) but there wasn’t any significant correlation between anxiety and social practice scores with educational success.CONCLUSION: The results of this study show that physical, mental and general health is effective on educational success, so the family, university and community should provide the comprehensive polices for the promotion of these factors.

Keywords

• mental health
• depression
• educational success
• students