Saúde mental de estudantes dos cursos de graduação em engenharia

Abstract

It is assumed that the university environment can be a trigger for stressful situations. In addition, most college students are teenagers or young adults in the process of building their identity. In this period of life, there may be psychical fragilities that can unleash their learning and the motivation to keep following his/her undergraduate program. Compared to Health Sciences students, those on Technology areas of knowledge have less access to information about psychosocial health, such as symptoms of illness and forms of treatment among others. Given this scenario, our goal is to investigate the current mental health state of engineering students. This is a quantitative case study research. The empirical field was the eleven engineering undergraduate programs of the Technology Center of the Federal University of Ceará (CT-UFC) and the subjects were first year students. The instruments and data collection technique were sociodemographic questionnaires, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and the World Health Organization (WHOQoL-Bref) Quality of Life questionnaire applied to 418 students. The relevance of the research was to obtain consistent information about the current mental health state of the first year engineering students at the CT- UFC, and it was explicit that many of these students are already entering higher education with symptoms of illness that provoke university actions for promotion of mental health in order to favor the learning process and the student’s quality of life.