A Descriptive study to assess stressors, its effects and coping mechanisms amongst medical college students

Background: Stress among college students has been a topic of interest for many years. Medical students are not an exclusion from this. Stress reduces the efficiency in academics, social life and also has its effects in inter-personal relationships. Hence, to be proficient and capable to serve the society, medical students need to be trained in a healthy and stress-free environment, which not just focuses on academics, but also their emotional, social and physical wellbeing. Therefore, this study was designed to find the prevalence of stress; the common stressors, effects and common methods of coping mechanism amongst medical students. Material and Methods: This is a cross-sectional analytical study with an all-inclusive sampling technique including participation of MBBS Students of all years from a Medical College in Raigad district, Maharashtra. An informed written consent was obtained from the study participants. A pre- validated and pretested MSSQ questionnaire in self-reporting format was used. Central tendency, measures of dispersion and test of significance like Chi square test, Kruskal Wallis test etc. were used during data analysis by Microsoft Excel and SPSS version 21. Results: It was found that of the academic related stress is the major cause of stress amongst all years. Large amount of content to be learnt and lack of time to review study material were found out to be the significant (p < 0.05). On studying the effects of stress, anxiety was the most common (p < 0.05). Sleeping was found to be the most common coping mechanism while alcohol consumption and use of drugs was a least used coping strategy. Conclusion: Academic stressor is the dominant stressor and highest in final year students. Anxiety is most common effect of stress. Sleeping is most common coping mechanism. Finding the various stressors, will help the institutions to monitor and bring to action strong interventions like establishing student support group for stress management programs in Medical Colleges in order to reduce the stress amongst medical students.