Students of veterinary medicine are more likely than human medicine students or undergraduate students to struggle with depression, U.S. researchers say. Mac Hafen, a therapist and clinical instructor at Kansas State's College of Veterinary Medicine, and colleagues at Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska and East Carolina University, say they took a closer look at depression and anxiety among veterinary medical students.
Although the mental health of human medicine students has been extensively studied, the same extent of study had not been performed with veterinary medicine students, Hafen says.
"We are hoping to predict what contributes to depression levels so that we can intervene and make things run a little bit more smoothly for students themselves," Hafen says in a statement.
Once a semester, the researchers anonymously surveyed veterinary medicine students in various stages of academic study.
During the first year of veterinary school, 32 percent of the veterinary medicine students surveyed showed symptoms of depression, compared to 23 percent of human medicine students who showed symptoms above the clinical cutoff, as evidenced by other studies.
Veterinary students experience higher depression rates as early as the first semester of their first year of study, but the depression rates appear to increase even more during the second and third year of school. However, during the fourth year, depression rates drop down to first-year levels, Hafen says.
The findings are published in the Journal of Veterinary Medicine Education.
