(564a) Engineering Student Mental Health and Help Seeking: Analysis of Data from the Healthy Minds Study

Mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation are becoming increasingly prevalent on college campuses, leading some to label higher education as suffering from a mental health crisis. Within engineering, the rigorous courseload and highly competitive nature of such programs creates a “culture of stress” which could be negatively impacting students’ mental health. However, published works have not provided a clear comparison between engineering students and students from outside engineering on the prevalence of mental health concerns or the likelihood of seeking help for those concerns. Additionally, few studies have looked at how identity factors such as gender might impact the interpretation of these results across engineering and non-engineering student populations. This study used publicly available data from the 2019-2020 Healthy Minds Study to understand how self-reported mental health distress and professional help seeking differs between undergraduate engineering and non-engineering student populations, as well as how it varies between engineering student demographic groups.

The Healthy Minds Study is an annual survey conducted at universities across the United States that examines factors related to mental health in student populations. The dataset used in this study contained responses from over 56,000 students, with almost 8,000 students from engineering majors, and 48,000 students from non-engineering majors. Regression analyses were used to examine each mental health and help-seeking variable across demographic groups and fields of study (e.g., engineering, business, humanities). When comparing across all engineering and non-engineering students, engineering students reported symptoms associated with lower levels of both anxiety (p < .001) and depression (p < .001). However, when controlling for gender, both male and female engineering students reported statistically similar levels of both anxiety and depression as compared to non-engineering students. Among distressed undergraduate students, engineering students were significantly statistically more likely than several other fields to have seen a therapist or counselor in the prior twelve months, when controlling for covariates (p<0.05), and no fields of study were statistically significantly less likely than engineering to have. Results from this study identify important differences in mental health status and help-seeking behavior across engineering and non-engineering student populations and highlight the importance of further research identifying both the cause of this treatment gap, and ways to reduce it so that engineering students can live full, productive lives.