Prevalence of Anxiety, Depression, and Substance Use among Secondary School Students Aged 10 - 24 Years in the Southwest Region of Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mental health disorders represent a significant public health concern, particularly among adolescents. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of mental health disorders and associated factors, as well as knowledge of mental health, among secondary school students in the Southwest Region of Cameroon. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 958 secondary school students. Data were collected on demographics, knowledge of mental health disorders, and the presence of anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, and suicidal thoughts. Descriptive statistics and univariate and multivariate logistic regression were used. Results: The overall prevalence of mental health disorders (anxiety, depression, and substance use) was 73.6%, with high rates of anxiety (54.7%), depression (57.3%), and substance use disorders (42.2%). Knowledge of mental health disorders was adequate for 55.3% of the students. Males demonstrated lower odds of adequate knowledge than females (OR = 0.730, 95% CI: 0.559 - 0.954), and residents of Tiko had lower odds than residents of Limbe (OR = 0.368, 95% CI: 0.213 - 0.639). Younger age groups and the presence of suicidal thoughts were significantly associated with mental health disorders according to multivariate analysis. Conclusion: This study revealed a high prevalence of anxiety, depression, and substance use among students. 55.3% of students demonstrated adequate knowledge of mental health. Disparities exist in terms of gender and location. These findings highlight the urgent need for mental health awareness programs, especially for vulnerable populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".