Prevalance of Suicide Ideation Among Medical Students at Ridgeway Campus

Iffat Ahmed & Ravi Paul^*

Department of Psychiatry, University Teaching Hospital, Zambia

Dr. Ravi Paul, Department of Psychiatry, University Teaching Hospital, Zambia.

Keywords: Suicide Ideation; Depression; Suicide Risk Screening Scale (SRSS); Becks Depression Index (BDI)

Abstract

Background
Suicidal thoughts, or suicidal ideation, means thinking about or planning suicide [1]. Medical doctors are one of the high risk groups for suicide [2,3]. According to a study done by Schernhammer and Colditz (2004), the suicide rate among male physicians is more than 40% higher than males in the general population, and that of female physicians is 130% higher than females in the general population. This problem seems to arise during medical school [4,5]. A study done by Ricardo and Carlos (2018) revealed that the prevalence of suicidal ideation ranged from 1.8% to 53.6% in medical students from 17 different countries. They also found that depression and depressive symptoms, a previous diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder, lower socioeconomic status/financial difficulties, having a history of drug use, and feeling neglected by parents were the most common factors associated with suicide ideation in these students.
Little is known about the prevalence of Suicide Ideation and its associated factors in the Zambian medical setting and this study was done to find the prevalence and associated factors of suicide ideation in medical students at Ridgeway Campus.
Methods
A three part self-administered questionnaire that contained a sociodemographic questionnaire, SRSS and BDI was distributed amongst medical students at Ridgeway Campus to collect data for a sample size of 283 participants. Data was analyzed using STATA Version 14.2.

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