Resilience and its relatedness to mental distress among nursing students in a Nigerian tertiary educational institution

Abstract

Background: The process of nursing education has been described to be very stressful with associated mental distress and unwellness. The cost of these are exorbitant on the individuals, significant others and the society at large. Resilience has been identified as one of the elements that can reverse this trend. It is based on this premise that the present study is contributing to the field of positive education by investigating the distinguishing features of high and low resilient nursing students to mental health distress and its related relatedness.

Methodology: Data were cross-sectionally collected from 66 nursing students from 2nd to 5th year of study. The data were on participants’ sociodemography, their resilience characteristics, presence of symptoms of mental distress, anxiety and depression, level of social support and mindfulness practices.

Results: Participants’ mean age was 21.75 years (SD = 3.20) and predominantly females (89.60%). Majority of them had mental unwellness (i.e. cases on GHQ-12, HADS-depression subscale and HADS-anxiety subscale were respectively 78.8%, 87.9% and 92.4%) with good resilience characteristics (53.0%), moderate social support (57.6%) and good mindfulness practices (51.5%). Resilience was moderately and significantly related to depressive symptoms and mindfulness practices.

Conclusion: Mental distress is common among undergraduate nursing students. And that the distress was more among high resilient student despite their noted good mindfulness practices. Their poor social support characteristics suggested inadequately ability to buffer the noted distress. A way to reverse this to boost the participants’ resilience with benefit of improving academic performances and limiting future professional burnouts.

Key Words: Nursing students, Mental distress, Resilience, Mindfulness practices