Study on Stress Among Male Resident Medical Students: A Cause of Concern

Stress is defined as a highly subjective phenomenon and it is a nonspecific response of body to any demand for change [1]. A stressor is defined as the personal or environmental event that causes stress. Stress is an inevitable part of medical education and can affect students at any stage of their study. Sleepless nights, depression [2] suicidal ideation [3] addictions to dependence-producing drugs for coping up with stress, and poor performance at examinations in spite of doing hard work are some of the ill effects of stress. Resident scholars are more prone to stress as they are away from family which adds to their woes. Thus, an attempt was made to study the stress among the resident medical scholars.

Objective

To Identify the causes leading to increased stress among Resident medical students.

A cross sectional survey was carried out in a boy’s hostel of a medical college in Jammu and Kashmir. A total 100 hostel inmates participated in the process. A predesigned questionnaire was used to study the leading causes of stress. The first part comprised demographic information of students such as age, sex, and residence. The second part of the questionnaire included questions about the causative factors of stress. The third part consisted of questions related to activities done to relieve stress. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS2.0 and Excel.

A total of 140 resident medical scholars participated in the study. A total of 100 (71.44%) respondents revealed some ill effects of stress (Figure1 & 2).

Figure 1:Causes of stress..

Figure 2:Stress coping strategies.

This study confirmed the general impression that stress is common among medical students with a prevalence of 71.4% among our study group. The findings of this study are by and large similar to other studies [1,4-6]. The major cause of stress in the study is found out to be academic related which included large syllabus to be learnt, being away from family, lack of time to revise the subject, difficulty in understanding the subject, poor performance at the examination, and lack of recognition of work done by students. Other nonsignificant academic factors include poor relationship with professors, poor participation in class discussion, and lack of interest in learning. Poor performance in the examinations was accreted mainly owing to lack of time for revision and large content to be learnt [7].

Our study also included the type and measure of stress-coping skills adopted by the students 11, playing games and sports (30%) was the common strategy employed by the students to relive stress followed by use of social media like facebook (24%). About 21% of them were not involved in any activity to cope up with stress, 12% involved in listening to music, and 8% used sleeping to cope stress [8].

The study revealed that academic problems were greater sources of stress and being away from family was also a major cause of stress. Student distress may influence professional development and adversely impact academic performance contributing to academic dishonesty and substance abuse. Addressing these issues using professional help would go a long way in ameliorating their stress levels and in making their learning a pleasant affair.

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