RESUMO
COVID-19 has significantly impacted the mental health and well-being of college youth across the world. An online survey using checklists and open-ended questions was shared across various institutions in India to capture information about challenges faced, internal and external resources utilized to deal with the stress, existing support systems and suggestions for additional support for maintaining well-being by college youth. Thematic analysis was conducted to understand the emergent themes. Findings suggested that the most challenging aspect of the pandemic was worry about academics, career, and health of loved ones. The most useful self-management strategies to deal with stress were pursuing hobbies, learning new things, spending time with family, sharing concerns and positive self-talks. The students suggested more robust academic as well as mental health support mechanisms at the university level. At the community level students highlighted the need for community based mental health programs and more support from families. This is one of the very first exploratory studies on the potential mental health impact of the pandemic on Indian university students.
RESUMO
Youth mental illnesses are chronic and recurrent and present a continuous disease development and progression, which cause different functional impairments like cognitional, emotional and behavioral disorders.At pre-sent, the clinical diagnosis of youth mental illness largely relies on behavioral symptoms.The diagnosis is made by the consistency between behaviors and symptoms of patients and those described in the diagnostic criteria.Although the diagnosis is operational to a certain extent in clinical practise, its assessment is subjective and lacks effective neurobio-logical indicators, resulting in a low consistency of diagnosis and great challenges in the early diagnosis and standardized intervention of youth mental illnesses.The prodromal symptoms in youth mental illness are unspecific and there is a decrement in neurocognition including social cognition by the emergence of traditional symptom sets.Therefore, transdiagnostic clinical staging model is of great significance in clinical assessment in youth mental illness.Here, the essentials of the " transdiagnostic clinical staging in youth mental health: a first international consensus statement" published in the World Psychiatry in 2020 were interpreted, with a detailed analysis of the key updates, aiming to provide a reference for clinical diagnosis and treatment of youth mental illness.