INTRODUCTION Student mental health problems are now commonly understood using a psychiatric model in which diagnosed anxiety and mood disorders are viewed to be so widespread as to constitute a crisis. Less attention is given to the role of developmental processes, such as identity formation and purpose, in understanding the types of distress current university students can experience. We fill this void by simultaneously assessing the effectiveness of both psychiatric and developmental variables in predicting how often students feel emotional distress in the form of frequently feeling too anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed to study. METHODS Binary logit models were fitted to online survey data collected from a cross-sectional, nation-wide sample of 1010 Canadian full-time university students aged 18 to 24 (63% female). RESULTS Our findings confirm that the psychiatric and developmental models both explain variance in academic distress. We also found that a developmental model operationalized using key measures of identity formation and purpose significantly accounted for academic distress, over and above variance explained by psychiatric diagnoses. In other words, not only do many students with a psychiatric diagnosis experience distress linked to problems with identity/purpose that interferes with studying, but so do a considerable proportion of students without any diagnosis. This impact persists after controlling for a host of variables assessing demographic/family background, academic preparation and performance, and a number of factors believed to aggravate emotional distress. CONCLUSIONS Universities can respond to the mental health crisis by approaching some forms of distress as developmental problems associated with identity and purpose.

中文翻译：

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学生心理健康危机：评估精神病学和发展解释模型。

引言 现在普遍使用精神病学模型来理解学生的心理健康问题，在该模型中，诊断出的焦虑和情绪障碍被认为非常普遍，以至于构成了危机。较少关注发展过程的作用，例如身份形成和目的，在理解当前大学生可能经历的困境类型方面的作用。我们通过同时评估精神病学和发育变量在预测学生以经常感到过于焦虑、沮丧或不知所措而无法学习的形式感到情绪困扰的频率来填补这一空白。方法 二元 logit 模型适用于从 1010 名 18 至 24 岁的加拿大全日制大学生（63% 为女性）的横断面全国样本收集的在线调查数据。结果 我们的研究结果证实，精神病学和发展模型都可以解释学业困扰的差异。我们还发现，使用身份形成和目的的关键措施实施的发展模型显着解释了学业上的压力，超出了由精神病学诊断解释的差异。换句话说，不仅许多有精神病学诊断的学生经历了与身份/目的问题相关的困扰，这些问题干扰了学习，而且相当一部分没有任何诊断的学生也是如此。在控制了许多评估人口/家庭背景、学业准备和表现以及被认为会加剧情绪困扰的因素后，这种影响仍然存在。