Pattern of access, early predictors of use, and treatment effectiveness of a psychological counselling service for medical students: an Italian longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

Psychological counselling represents sensitive frontline services for the detection and treatment of early signs of distress in students. This study aims to assess psychological distress in medical students at the beginning of their academic career and the access rate to a counselling service during medical school. Predictors of access to the service and the effectiveness of the service were also explored. Distress and emotional dysregulation were measured in three consecutive cohorts of first-year students (n = 385, 53% female). Students accessing the counselling service at any time during the 6 years of medical school all completed the same baseline measurements and a pre/post assessment of the intervention. Nearly one-third of first-year students reported levels of distress above the clinical cutoff. The access rate to the counselling service was 13.9%. Only 21% of the students with clinical levels of distress contacted the counselling service. Living alone and having high distress at the beginning of the medical course were the main predictors of access to the service. Students reported a significant reduction of distress and dysregulation after counselling interventions. More efforts are needed to develop effective tools for identifying and tracking medical students in psychological hardship and to increase their willingness to attend the counselling services.

KEYWORDS:

• university counseling
• psychological distress
• emotion regulation
• medical students
• clinical psychology

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Rossella Dolce and Valerio Salvarani for data collection and to Rebecca Cavaliere for manuscript proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

Ethical approval

Institutional Review Board of the University of Milano-Bicocca (protocol numbers: 001468 and 0039927).

Authorship and copyright

All authors confirm that the submitted manuscript is an original contribution and has not been previously published, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and that, if accepted, will not be published elsewhere in a similar form in any language, without the consent of the Editor. We also confirm that all authors contributed significantly to the study.

Data availability statement

The data sets generated during this study are not publicly available as we do not have permission from study participants. Group-level information about the data is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the University of Milano-Bicocca [grant number: 2014-ATE-0453; 2015-ATE-0481; 2016-ATE-0607, P.I. Maria Grazia Strepparava].