338 Classroom mental wellness exercise improves wellness domains

Abstract

Poor mental health is a rising problem in undergraduate students, with anxiety and depression leading mental health issues. Insufficient or low physical activity, social isolation, and loneliness are among risk factors that predict mental health issues. Increased demand for already limited mental health resources such as counseling, combined with the stigma surrounding mental health has led to many issues going untreated. Mental health can be comprised of several domains such as academic, physical, emotional, financial, occupational, and stage of life. Improving individual domains will improve overall mental wellness. The objective of this study was to improve mental wellness in individual domains by discussing mental health and encouraging undergraduate students to reduce predictive factors and specifically focus on self-selected wellness domains. Following a 60-min classroom discussion in an animal science course on the prevalence of mental health issues and the common wellness domains (Academic, Emotional, Financial, Interpersonal, Occupational, Physical, and Stage of Life) students (n = 24) rated their current feeling of wellness in each domain on a Likert-scale of 0 (totally lacking) to 6 (completely fulfilled) in an anonymous Qualtrics survey. Strategies on improving the different wellness domains were then discussed, and students were placed into groups based on common domains they would like to improve, and the groups helped individual members identify semester personal goals. A class-wide social media group was formed, and students were given bonus points for posting pictures and texts of progression towards their goals. To encourage participation and support from group members, groups were awarded additional bonus points for having the greatest member activity. After 12 wk, students were given a post-course survey to rate their wellness domain fulfillments, as well as report the amount of time dedicated to improving the specific domains. Pre-and post-course wellness fulfillment ratings were compared using the Mann-Whitney-U Test in SPSS, and Spearman’s rho was used to determine correlations between post-fulfillment ratings and time dedicated to each domain. Fulfillment of Emotional and Physical increased following the exercise (P ≤ 0.016), and Academic tended to increase (P = 0.079). Time spent fulfilling a specific domain was positively correlated with the respective domain for Academic (P = 0.003), Emotional (P < 0.001), Interpersonal (P = 0.006), Physical (P < 0.001), and Stage of Life (P < 0.001) and tended to be positively correlated (P = 0.084) for Occupational. There was no correlation between time spent fulfilling the Financial domain and Financial fulfillment score (P = 0.183). Employing open classroom discussions about mental health and encouraging students to become proactive in their strategies for improving specific mental wellness domains increases their feelings of fulfillment in those domains.