The influence of rural living and childhood trauma on the psychological distress and somatic symptom of undergraduates in China / 中国神经精神疾病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore the influence of urbanicity of birth place,upbringing place,gender,childhood neglect,physical abuse and lack of parental accompaniment on the psychological distress and somatic symptom of university students in China.Methods Four thousand six hundred and twenty second-year undergraduates of a comprehensive university in Sichuan Province were surveyed using the 6-item Kessler psychological distress (K6) scale,patient health questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15),a questionnaire adapted from the childhood section of the World Mental Health Composite International Diagnostic Interview(WMH-CIDI) for childhood neglect and physical abuse and a self-designed questionnaire for lack of parental accompany in childhood.Generalized linear model (GLM) with gamma family was used for the multivariate regression analyses.Results Female (β=0.894,P＜0.001),rural upbinging (β=0.378,P＜0.010),childhood neglect (β=0.279,P＜0.001) and childhood physical abuse (β=0.550,P＜0.001) were associated with psychological distress.Female (β=2.638,P＜0.001),rural upbinging (β=0.395,P=0.015),childhood neglect (β=0.487,P＜0.010) and childhood physical abuse (β=0.483,P＜0.001) were associated with somatic symptom.And psychological distress was positively correlated with somatic symptom (r=0.545,P＜0.001).Conclusions Rural living,female,childhood adversities are prone to increase the severity of both psychological distress and somatic symptom of university students in China.Psychological distress and somatic symptom are positively correlated in aspect of severity.