How medical students cope with stress: a cross-sectional look at strategies and their sociodemographic antecedents

Abstract

Background Medical training can be highly stressful for students and negatively impact their mental health. Important to this matter are the types of coping strategies (and their antecedents) medical students use, which are only characterized to a limited extent. A better understanding of these phenomena can shed additional light on ways to support the health and well-being of medical students. Accordingly, we sought to determine medical students’ use of various coping reactions to stress and how their gender and year of study influence those behaviours. Methods A total of 400 University of Saskatchewan medical students were invited to complete an online survey. Using the Brief COPE inventory, we assessed students’ reported use of various adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. Descriptive and comparative statistics were performed, including multivariate analysis of variance, to explore how gender and year influenced coping strategies. Results The participation rate was 49% (47% males and 53% females). Overall, the students’ coping strategies were mostly adaptive, albeit with a few exceptions. Females used more behavioural disengagement, while males used less emotional and instrumental support. Additionally, third years used more denial to cope with stress than students in any other year. Conclusions While few studies report significant sociodemographic effects on medical student coping, our findings raise the possibility that males and females do engage in different coping strategies in medical school, and that the clinical learning environment in third year may provoke more dysfunctional coping, compared to pre-clinical stages of training. Potential explanations and implications of these results are discussed.

Psychological Morbidities and Coping Styles: A Rural Institution-Based Cross-Sectional Comparative Study between Undergraduate Medical Students Undergoing Different Phases of Training

“…4 Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence supporting that the further medical students get in their education, the more emotionally taxing it might be. 48 49 This pattern in medical education literature aligns with the observations of the present study where emotional coping styles were used relatively more commonly by the clinical students as compared with another group, while findings revealed by Bamuhair et al 22 were inconsistent with this notion. However, a significant positive correlation between psychological morbidities and PEC and PPC scores in clinical years indicates that coping styles adopted by students at a very challenging stage of medical education were not satisfactory and predicts stress in long term.…”

How Do Polish Students Manage Emotional Distress during the COVID-19 Lockdown? A Web-Based Cross-Sectional Study

“…Regarding gender differences, in a COVID-19 situation, a May 2021 study by Neufeld et al showed that females reported greater use of behavioral disengagement, while men reported less trust in emotional and instrumental support [61]. The literature suggests that differences in coping with stress may be due to playing gender roles [62].…”

Academic and Social Impact of Menstrual Disturbances in Female Medical Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

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