2002 Mental and Emotional Health Provided below are results from Michigan State University's 2002
National Collegiate Health Assessment relating to mental and emotional
health. |
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| Emotions Respondents Experienced Over the Year To measure the experience of depression, stress, anxiety, and other markers of emotional well-being, the questionnaire asked respondents to indicate how many times over the last school year, they experienced various feelings, each of which in the list represented an increasingly intense emotion difficulty – from “felt overwhelmed by all you had to do” to “attempted suicide.” The table on the right indicates the percentage distribution of responses to each of the different emotional states. That table indicates that: • More than a third of the respondents indicated having felt overwhelmed and exhausted nine or more times during the last school year; 18.8% said they had felt very sad that many times, and 12.4% said they had felt things were hopeless that many times.
• 41.7% said they had felt so depressed that it was difficult to function at least once during the school year; 6.7% said they had seriously considered attempting suicide at least once; and slightly less than 1% said they had attempted suicide at least once. |
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| Scoring of Emotional Difficulties To explore the experience of such emotional difficulties within
the student population, we have constructed an overall index score
represented by the combined responses to each of the seven items.
Scores could range from 0 for respondents who said they never had
any of these troubled feelings to a score of 84 for respondents
who said they had felt or done each of these 11 or more times during
the last school year. The overall average index score was 22.3 with
a standard deviation of 15.9. The table on the right compares these
average index scores across demographic groups and indicates females
tended to report having experienced more emotionally troubled times
than males (24.8 vs. 19.3), but there were no statistically significant
differences by race/ethnicity, residence location, or membership
in a Greek organization. There was a statistically significant difference
in the index scores across age groups of respondents but there was
no clear pattern to the difference. Additionally, students with
a “B” grade-point average had a lower mean index score
than their counterparts with higher and lower GPA’s. • Those who had been verbally threatened for sex against their will, sexually touched against their will, the victim of an attempted rape, had been involved in an emotionally abusive relationship, or had been involved in a sexually abusive relationship all had higher index scores – meaning they reported more times feeling emotionally troubled in the seven ways listed – than those who had not be victimized in these ways. • There was no significant difference between those who said they were raped and those not and between those who had been in a physically abusive relationship and those not, although the pattern and magnitude of the differences in mean index scores in both cases were comparable to those where the differences were significant; however, in both of the situations, there were so few reporting having been victimized that the differences in means was not quite significant statistically. • There was no significant difference in mean index scores
between those who had been involved in a physical fight and those
who had not. |
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