Acceptability and Feasibility of a Universal Preventive Intervention

Mental health in the university population has become a common and serious problem within university institutions worldwide in recent years. Various meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown worrying figures in the last five years. In the USA, it has been described in medical students that between 6.0% and 66.5% have depression, between 7.7% and 65.5% anxiety disorders, and between 12.2% and 96.7% present stress. In China, on the other hand, a study reported in 2016 that the prevalence of depression was 23.8%. In Latin America, a Brazilian article conducted on medical students shows a prevalence of depression at 30.6%, anxiety disorders at 32.9%, and stress at 49.9%. In Chile, there are very few studies that address the prevalence of mental health disorders and associated risk factors in the university population. The article published in 2014 by Baader et al. is one of the first records was carried out on a population of 800 students in 2008 at the Austral University of Chile, reporting a prevalence of 27% of depression and 5.3% of students who present a moderate to severe risk of suicide. During April and May 2019, the results of the "First National University Mental Health Survey" project were presented, a project led by the Catholic University of Temuco and sponsored by the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), carried out to 600 students from the Catholic University of Temuco, the University of Concepción and the University of Tarapacá. This project showed that 46% of the students presented depressive symptoms, 46% anxiety symptoms, and 53.5% stress symptoms. Furthermore, 29.7% presented the three symptoms simultaneously, and 5.1% of the students had suicidal thoughts at the time of the study. In a review of published studies on mental health in higher education students in Chile, a wide variability in the prevalence of psychological symptoms among students was identified. The findings showed a range of prevalence of psychological distress be