Relevance of mental health problem among undergraduate students of West Bengal during Covid-19

Abstract

Mental health subjects hindrance to scholastic achievement. Mental health crunch has appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students’ stimulation, devotion, and social exchanges all these decisive variables were affected due to mental illness and it creates an impact on the success of higher education. Understudies are progressively perceived as a weak populace, as suffering from higher levels of tension, melancholy, substance misuse, and confused eating contrasted with everyone. This scenario has brought a drastic change in educational system —such as sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic—the burden on the mental health of this vulnerable population is amplified. The key concentration of the study is to conjecture the impact of a pandemic on the mental health of undergraduate students in West Bengal. The mental health problems have been emerged among the understudies and it will gauge the relevant factors that is related to the problem. The approach adopted by the investigator is Descriptive Survey in nature. To assess the mental health of fresh minds a Perceived Stress Scale has been used by the investigator on 5-point Likert scale to measure the mental health of 384 college going students of West Bengal through Google form. The Brief-COPE Scale was used to measure the operative and non-operative ways to cope with a stressful life event. The data were analyzed with the help of SPSS software. The results of the study revealed that the mental health of college going students have been severely affected due to stress, which ranges from low to moderate and moderate to high levels, respectively. Students preferred more emotion focused, actively focused, emotional support, positive reframing than self-blame, substance use, denial, venting. The research found that different social factors have a significant impact on the students’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. They have become mentally depressed, as the educational institutions have been closed for more than a year. With the closer educational institutions, most students are deprived of social contacts, which leads to depression, sleep, financial educational problems, etc. As appearing of various kinds of family and social crises in front of the students, like the quarrel between parents, lack of income in the family, and loss of job by family member leads them to be more mentally ill. To recover from the situation, they adopted various effective and ineffective coping strategies to make proper adjustment in life. Key words: Mental Health, Stress, Stressor, Students, Coping Styles