Prevalence and predictors of psychological distress and common mental health concerns among Filipino university teachers amid the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

The current pandemic has drastically changed the academic landscape, causing distressing experiences among students and teachers. While there are increasing studies demonstrating the psychological experiences of students during the pandemic, only a few have examined the mental health conditions of university teachers. The present study sought to address this gap by investigating the prevalence of psychological distress and common mental health disorders and their pandemic‐related risk factors among Filipino university teachers. A total of 1110 university teachers self‐reported their psychological distress, generalized anxiety, and major depression symptoms through an online assessment. Findings of the study revealed the overall prevalence of psychological distress at 55.6%, and anxiety and depression were 17.0% and 28.4%, respectively. Younger teachers (i.e., aged ≤31 years old) and those who have less than a year of teaching experience are more likely to reach the cut‐off scores for all outcomes. Further, teachers who have experienced pandemic‐related adversities are highly vulnerable to psychological distress, generalized anxiety, and depression. These results offer important implications for creating psychosocial interventions that will help teachers manage their distresses amid the pandemic situation.

Validating repurposed GAD‐7 anchored in COVID‐19 pandemic experiences: A factor‐ and person‐centered approach

“…Second, to the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the psychometric applicability of GAD in a group of academicians. Several studies have documented the substantial prevalence of anxiety symptoms among teachers due to the drastic changes in the academic landscape (e.g., abrupt school closures, lack of personal space and equipment to support online teaching) as a result of the pandemic (e.g., Agyapong et al, 2022;Mordeno et al, 2023;Ozamiz-Etxebarria et al, 2021). Taking this into account, having information on GAD-7's applicability as an assessment tool in the teacher sample enables the immediate and reliable screening that can pave the path for creating treatment programs tailor-fitted to address their unique mental health needs.…”