Medical Student Psychological Distress and Mental Illness Relative to the General Population: A Canadian Cross-Sectional Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To provide national data on Canadian medical students' mental health and show how their mental health compares with that of similarly aged postsecondary graduates from the general population. METHOD: In 2015-2016, the authors conducted a survey of medical students in all years of study at all 17 Canadian medical schools. The surveys included validated items and instruments to assess for psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and diagnosed mood and anxiety disorders. Comparative analyses were performed between medical students and similarly aged postsecondary graduates using data from the Canadian Community Health Survey-Mental Health 2012. RESULTS: The participation rate across all medical students was 40.2% (4,613/11,469). Relative to the general population of postsecondary graduates aged 20-34, medical students aged 20-34 had significantly higher rates of diagnosed mood disorders, diagnosed anxiety disorders, suicidal ideation, and psychological distress. Among medical students, being female was associated with having a mood or anxiety disorder, lifetime suicidal ideation, moderate or severe psychological distress, and higher mean Kessler Psychological Distress Scale 6-item summative scores. Being in clinical training was associated with having suicidal ideation, moderate or severe psychological distress, and mood and anxiety disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with postsecondary graduates from the general population, medical student respondents had significantly higher rates of psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and mood and anxiety disorders. Further research is needed to understand the factors that are contributing to these higher rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".