Abstract

University students can present mental health changes compatible with stress, anxiety or depression, due to the evolution of age and academic demands, especially in health careers, such as nursing. The latest National Health Survey indicated that 78% of university students suffer from some symptoms of depression. The objective of the study was to determine psychometric characteristics of depression, anxiety and stress, in nursing students of the Universidad Mayor, Temuco, Chile. The approach was quantitative, nonexperimental design, cross-sectional, in a sample of 244 students from first to fifth year. The Depression, Anxiety and Stress scale (DASS-21), validated in Chile by Vinet, Rehbein, Román and Saiz (Antúnez, 2012; Román, 2016), and was applied. The ethical aspects were approved by the Scientific Ethics Committee of Universidad Mayor campus Temuco. The analysis and presentation of results were by descriptive and inferential statistics with STATA®15 Software. The results indicated that 42.6% of the sample obtained characteristics compatible with depression, 48.0% with anxiety and 61.1% with stress. The most affected age range was between 19 and 21 years, corresponding to the academic levels from first to third. The three variables studied were significantly associated in the second year of the degree, highlighting the stress characteristics, and the lowest predominance of the three variables was in the fifth year. It was concluded that nursing students from the Universidad Mayor showed high percentages of these variables compatible with alterations in mental health in the first years of study, specifically in stress and anxiety over depression, with significant differences between the academic levels of entry and exit, which opens the opportunity for student support from the university entities involved in these aspects.