Psychological burden in Portuguese university students during the COVID-19 pandemic

University students are a risk population for mental health problems. This study aims to evaluate the psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portuguese university students and to uncover factors associated with worse psychological indicators.

We used an online survey to perform a cross-sectional study that evaluated students' perceptions, lifestyle, and psychological well-being during the pandemic. Depression symptoms and risk were measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, and resilience levels were quantified by the 9-item Resilience Evaluation Scale. Self-perceived levels of anxiety and current mental health status were evaluated.

From a population of around 30,000 students invited to participate, 1751 responses were obtained and 1447 were included. Most students were female (72.3%) and were taking a master's degree (58.4%). The course with more responses was engineering (25.5%), followed by medicine (13.2%). The prevalence rates for higher anxiety levels, depression risk, and low resilience levels were 66.7%, 37.3%, and 24.9%, respectively. The factors associated with better psychological outcomes were being male, spending more time studying, having a job, performing extracurricular activities, physical exercise, and relaxing activities. By contrast, spending more time watching news, difficulty accessing online lectures, and absence of contact with family or friends were associated with worse psychological indicators. Although all courses presented substantial levels of depressive symptoms, architectures/arts, sciences, and humanities scored significantly more in the depression scale. Medicine students had significantly higher resilience levels compared with other courses.

Our findings identify factors associated with worse psychological outcomes and can be used to create protective measures for the mental health of university students during current and future pandemics.