Prevalence and factors associated with common mental disorders among higher education students

The objective of this study was to describe the prevalence and factors associated with common mental disorders among higher education students. An integrative literature review was conducted, and articles retrieved from the Virtual Health Library, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences, Scientific Electronic Library Online, and Online System for the Search and Analysis of Medical Literature were analyzed based on the stress descriptors; anxiety, depression and students, from the Boolean operators. The prevalence of the outcome analyzed ranged from 35.5% to 78.6%. The factors associated with mental disorders were: sex, gender, skin color, marital status, graduation, study shift, average workload per day greater than 12 hours, less than one hour of leisure time per day, feeling that they do not receive necessary emotional support, having a previous medical history of psychiatric illness, using antidepressants, never having undergone psychotherapy or having abandoned it before being discharged, and use of alcohol and other substances, motivating factors associated with nervousness and self-demand, as well as the predominant use of defense instruments focused on the problem and social support and the feeling of absence of support from the university. It is an urgent need to build a national public mental health policy for higher education students.