Medical student distress, personal health care practices, and barriers to care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medical students experience higher levels of psychological distress than age-matched peers. Suicide rates are also higher among medical students and physicians in comparison to the general population. Despite reported health needs, medical students are reluctant to seek help for mental health issues potentially resulting in inappropriate self-care practices and impairment. This trend increases throughout training and has been observed among physician populations manifesting as persistent, long-term mental health problems. Medical students report unique barriers to care which occur at individual, provider, and system levels and reflect issues related to stigma and the medical school culture or environment. The aim of the current study was to determine the prevalence of psychological distress among a population of medical students in comparison to the general population, ascertain factors contributing to the distress, explore personal health care needs and practices, and identify barriers to care. A cross-sectional design was employed which involved administration of a survey. Participants included medical students in years one through four attending a university in Atlantic Canada. The prevalence of medical student distress in the current study was 17%. Medical students reported significantly higher levels of severe psychological distress (19%) than age-matched peers (5%) and yet were reluctant to seek help for mental health issues. Students also expressed concern they may develop mental health issues and/or inappropriate self-care practices over the course of their training. Students indicated a preference for informal consultation and off-site care, citing system-based barriers to care including concern for confidentiality, stigma, academic vulnerability and discomfort with the dual role of student-patient. Finally, students expressed reluctance to report impairment in a peer in scenarios depicting both high- and low-stigma consequences.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".