Mental health awareness among university students and associated contributing factors: A descriptive study at Govind Ballabh pant university of agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar

Introduction

Mental health is a fundamental dimension of human wellbeing, enabling individuals to realise their full potential, manage daily stresses, work productively, and contribute to their communities (World Health Organization, 2022) [19] . Within the context of higher education, university students represent a particularly vulnerable population. The transition to university life is characterised by a convergence of heightened academic demands, financial pressures, social adjustments, and identity explorationall occurring simultaneously during a developmentally sensitive period that elevates the risk of psychological distress.

The global burden of mental health disorders among university students has intensified markedly over the past decade. The Healthy Minds Study (2022) [8] , one of the largest ongoing surveys of its kind, reported that 41% of over 350,000 sampled students across North America met diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health disorder. In India, where the problem is compounded by cultural stigma and limited service infrastructure, studies report depression rates of 28.5% and anxiety rates of 35% among undergraduate students (Grover et al., 2020) [6] . Agricultural university settings present a unique intersection of these challenges: students face highly competitive curricula, www.extensionjournal.com career uncertainties linked to a volatile agrarian economy, significant family expectations, andfor manythe added stress of rural-to-urban transition upon entering campus life. Despite this growing burden, mental health awareness and help-seeking behaviour among students in Indian universities remain inadequate. Mental health awarenessencompassing recognition of symptoms, knowledge of causes and treatments, and attitudes that facilitate or inhibit seeking supportis a well-established precondition for timely intervention (Corrigan & Watson, 2002; Jorm et al., 1997) [4,11] . When awareness is low or distorted by stigma, students are significantly less likely to access care, resulting in conditions that deteriorate, adversely affect academic performance, and carry long-term consequences for individual and societal well-being (Hunt & Eisenberg, 2010; Laidlaw et al., 2016) [9,12] . Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology (GBPUAT), Pantnagarone of India's premier agricultural universitiesenrolls over 900 undergraduate students across programmes in agriculture, fisheries, veterinary science, biotechnology, and community science. Despite this substantial student population and its unique psychosocial vulnerabilities, empirical research specifically examining mental health awareness and its contributing factors within this institution is absent from the published literature. The present study addresses this gap through a systematic, data-driven assessment of awareness, stress contributors, help-seeking patterns, and institutional support knowledge among GBPUAT undergraduates. Its findings are intended to inform evidence-based mental health programming at the university and contribute to the broader literature on student mental health in Indian agricultural higher education.

Review of Literature 2.1 Prevalence of Mental Health Disorders Among University Students

A robust body of international and national research documents high rates of psychological distress in university populations. Beiter et al. (2015) [2] identified academic pressure, anxiety, and depression as the most prevalent mental health concerns, with examination stress functioning as a primary trigger. The American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment (2023) [1] reported that 44% of students had experienced depression that impaired their ability to function at some point during the preceding year. In India, Grover et al. (2020) [6] found that nearly one-third of medical undergraduates exhibited clinically significant depressive symptoms, with comparable or higher rates anticipated in multi-disciplinary settings. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) National Mental Health Survey (2016) [10] estimated that the lifetime prevalence of mental disorders among young adults aged 18-29 is approximately 13.5%, with the majority of cases remaining undiagnosed and untreated.

Mental Health Awareness and Its Determinants

Mental health awareness is a multi-dimensional construct encompassing the recognition of symptoms, knowledge of causes and treatments, and attitudes that facilitate helpseeking (Jorm et al., 1997) [11] . Corrigan and Watson (2002) [4] established foundational evidence that awareness interventions positively shift attitudes toward mental illness and increase help-seeking intentionsfindings since replicated across culturally diverse populations. Gorczynski et al. (2017) [5] found that students with higher mental health literacy reported lower levels of stigma-related avoidance and were significantly more likely to seek professional support. Reavley and Jorm (2011) [14] identified mental health literacy as the single strongest predictor of appropriate help-seeking among young adults. In collectivist societies such as India, awareness is further shaped by family norms, community values, and the frequent attribution of psychological distress to spiritual or moral causes rather than biomedical ones (Salibi et al., 2021) [16] .

Contributing Factors to Stress and Mental Health Challenges

The aetiology of mental health difficulties in university students is multifactorial. Academic workload and examination pressure are the most consistently identified stressors across cultures (Pascoe et al., 2020) [13] . Career uncertaintyparticularly relevant in Indian agricultural education where employment prospects are closely linked to policy-driven sector conditionsconstitutes an additional and culturally specific stressor. Financial constraints independently predict clinical anxiety, with Richardson et al. (2017) [15] documenting a 2.3-fold elevated risk of anxiety among financially stressed students. Family expectations, a significant dimension in the Indian university context, have been identified as exerting sustained psychological pressure through the threat of social disapproval and honour concerns (Gulliver et al., 2010) [7] . Digital technology and social media have emerged as contemporary stressors through mechanisms of social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO (fear of missing out), with widespread student recognition of their negative mental health impact (Victor & Bogart, 2020) [18] .

Help-Seeking Behaviour and Institutional Support

Despite the high burden of mental health difficulties, helpseeking from professional sources remains consistently low among university students globally. Hunt and Eisenberg (2010) [9] found that only 20-40% of students with diagnosable conditions sought professional support. In Indian contexts, this proportion is substantially lower due to compounding barriers including stigma, financial costs, lack of awareness of available services, and cultural preferences for informal family-based support (Gulliver et al., 2010) [7] . The persistent underutilisation of university counselling serviceseven where they existpoints to a systemic disconnect between service availability and student awareness and willingness to engage (Thorley, 2017) [17] .

Research Gap and Justification

While the literature on student mental health in India is growing, studies specifically examining mental health awarenessas distinct from disorder prevalencewithin agricultural and technical university settings in North India are conspicuously absent. No published study to date has examined mental health awareness among the student population of GBPUAT. Furthermore, few Indian studies integrate measurement of awareness, contributing factors, www.extensionjournal.com gender differences, year-of-study effects, and institutional support knowledge within a single analytical framework. The present study was designed to address all these dimensions simultaneously.

Research Methodology 3.1 Research Design

A descriptive research design was employed, appropriate for systematically characterising the distribution and correlates of mental health awareness across a defined student population without experimental manipulation.

Study Setting and Population

The study was conducted at Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology (GBPUAT), Pantnagar, Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarakhandone of India's first agricultural universities, established in 1960. The university offers undergraduate programmes in agriculture, fisheries, veterinary science, biotechnology, and community science. The total undergraduate population at the time of data collection was 923 students.

Sample and Sampling Technique

Convenience sampling was employed, with participants selected on the basis of availability and voluntary willingness to respond. A total of 227 undergraduate students completed the questionnaire, representing a response rate of 24.6% of the total undergraduate population (227/923). This technique was adopted given the time constraints of the study period and the self-reported, voluntary nature of the survey instrument.

Data Collection Instrument

A structured 22-item questionnaire was developed comprising seven thematic sections: (1) demographic profile age, gender, programme, year of study; (2) mental health awareness exposure -Q7-Q9; (3) belief about the importance of mental health -Q10; (4) attitudinal itemsfour statements rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree), Q11-Q14; (5) stress frequency and sources -Q15-Q16; (6) social media and mental health -Q17; and (7) institutional support awareness, help-seeking, and coping activities -Q18-Q20. An open-ended item (Q21) captured student recommendations for university-level improvements. The questionnaire was administered both online via Google Forms and offline in paper format during May 2026.

Scoring and Statistical Analysis

A composite Mental Health Awareness Index (MHAI) was computed as the arithmetic mean of the four Likert-scale items (Q11-Q14). Descriptive statisticsfrequencies, valid percentages, means, and standard deviationswere computed for all variables. Gender-based sub-group analysis compared mean MHAI scores across male and female respondents. Year-of-study analysis examined stress frequency and institutional support awareness across academic cohorts. Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient (r) was calculated to examine the association between the MHAI and academic stress frequency. All statistical computations were performed using Python 3.x.

Results and Findings 4.1 Demographic Profile of Respondents

Table 1 presents the complete demographic profile of the 227 student respondents. The sample was predominantly male (59.0%, n = 134) and in the 18-21 age group (57.3%, n = 130). Community Science and BTech constituted the largest programme groups (26.9% and 26.4% respectively), followed by BFSc (14.5%) and BVSc & AH (10.6%). First-year students formed the largest academic cohort (30.0%), with near-equal representation of second-year (25.6%) and fourth-year or above (25.6%) students.

Mental Health Awareness -Exposure, Knowledge, and Beliefs

The vast majority of respondents (97.8%, n = 222) reported www.extensionjournal.com having heard about mental health awareness, indicating near-universal surface-level exposure. However, only 26.0% rated their knowledge as 'very good', with 43.2% rating it 'good' and 28.2% 'average'. A small proportion (2.6%) reported poor knowledge. When asked whether mental health is as important as physical health, 91.2% agreed, with only 4.0% disagreeing. Table 2 presents these findings in full. Social media (68.3%) and internet/articles (55.1%) were the dominant information sources, far outpacing formal institutional channels. Workshops and seminarsthe most structured and content-controlled communication modality reached only 20.7% of students, representing the lowest uptake of all available channels.

Attitudinal Beliefs -Likert Scale Analysis and Composite MHAI

Students' attitudinal beliefs regarding mental health were assessed using four Likert-scale items. Table 3 presents item-level descriptive statistics and the composite Mental Health Awareness Index (MHAI). The composite MHAI of 3.95 (SD = 0.96) out of 5.00 reflects a moderately high overall awareness level. The item 'Universities should provide mental health support services' recorded the highest mean (M = 4.09, SD = 1.14), with 77.5% of respondents in agreement or strong agreement. The item on professional help-seeking followed closely (M = 4.04, SD = 1.12; 77.5% agreement). The stigma item recorded the lowest mean (M = 3.78, SD = 1.00), yet 68.7% acknowledged that stigma around mental health persistsa finding of direct relevance for intervention design. The item on open discussion recorded the widest standard deviation (SD = 1.32), indicating the greatest diversity of student opinion on this dimension.

Contributing Factors to Stress

Students were asked to identify from a provided checklist all factors that contributed to stress in their lives. Table 4 presents the frequency and percentage of each reported stressor. Academic pressure was the most prevalent stressor, reported by 76.2% of respondents. Career uncertainty (66.1%) and family expectations (59.0%) ranked second and third, reflecting the specific psychosocial context of an www.extensionjournal.com agricultural university where career pathways are uncertain and familial investment in education is high. Examinations (57.7%) and financial problems (54.2%) were each reported by over half of all students. Lack of sleep (48.0%) and social relationship difficulties (45.4%) affected nearly half the sample, underscoring the multi-dimensional nature of the stress burden.

Frequency of Academic Stress

Table 5 presents the distribution of self-reported academic stress frequency across the sample. Year-of-study analysis (Table 6) reveals that second-year students bear a disproportionate burden of frequent stress. Second-year students exhibited the highest burden of frequent stress (53.4%), notably higher than all other year groups. First and third-year students recorded broadly comparable levels (36.8% and 39.5% respectively), while fourth-year and above students reported the lowest frequency (29.3%), suggesting that academic stress may diminish as students develop coping strategies and clarity over their academic trajectories in the later years of study.

Social Media and Mental Health

When asked whether social media use and screen time affect mental health, 68.3% (n = 155) responded 'Yes', 25.1% (n = 57) 'Maybe', and only 6.6% (n = 15) 'No'. The combined positive response (Yes + Maybe) of 93.4% indicates nearuniversal student perception of social media's mental health impact, consistent with emerging literature on digital stress, social comparison, and FOMO among young adults (Victor & Bogart, 2020) [18] .

Awareness of University Mental Health Support Services

A majority of respondents -54.2% (n = 123)reported awareness of mental health support services available at their university, while 45.8% (n = 104) reported no awareness. Table 7 presents awareness levels by year of study. 8 and9 present full results for helpseeking preferences and coping activities respectively. Informal and largely passive coping strategies dominated, with listening to music (67.4%) as the most widely used activity. Only 23.8% practised meditation or yoga despite its well-established efficacy for stress reduction. The prevalence of speaking to no one (23.3%) and the minimal engagement with professional counselling (8.4%) together point to a significant unmet need for both formal support services and structured psycho-educational programming on effective coping.

Gender Differences in Awareness Scores

Gender-based sub-group analysis of the four Likert-scale items revealed consistent and statistically meaningful differences between male and female respondents across all dimensions. [9] . Given that male students constitute 59.0% of the sample, this gap represents a substantial population-level challenge for mental health programming.

Correlation between MHAI and Academic Stress

Frequency A Pearson's product-moment correlation analysis between the Composite MHAI and academic stress frequency (n = 226) yielded r = 0.171, indicating a small but statistically positive relationship. This finding suggests that students with higher mental health awareness scores also tend to report higher frequency of academic stressconsistent with the hypothesis that mental health literacy enhances self-awareness and recognition of one's own stress responses (Jorm et al., 1997) [11] . While the correlation is modest in magnitude, its positive direction rules out the concern that awareness training may produce complacency and confirms that awareness and experienced stress are not inversely related in this population.

Student Recommendations for Universities

In response to the open-ended item (Q21), 20.7% of students recommended the introduction or strengthening of mental health awareness programmes and workshops, 14.5% called specifically for dedicated counselling services, 7.5% identified the need for better overall support systems, and 6.6% prioritised stress management programmes. One quarter of respondents (25.1%) offered no specific suggestion, reflecting either satisfaction with current provision or disengagement from the questionitself a finding of relevance for student voice in institutional planning.

Discussion

The findings of this study present a nuanced picture of mental health awareness at GBPUAT that is simultaneously encouraging and deeply concerning. The near-universal exposure to mental health concepts (97.8% having heard about mental health awareness) and the moderately high MHAI score of 3.95 out of 5.00 indicate that students at this institution are not starting from a position of total ignorance. The strong consensus that mental health is as important as physical health (91.2% agreement) and that universities have a responsibility to provide support services (77.5% agreement) reflects a student body that is broadly receptive to mental health-supportive institutional policies. However, this surface-level awareness masks critical deficiencies. The gap between the 97.8% who have heard about mental health awareness and the mere 26.0% who rate their knowledge as 'very good'with 28.2% rating it only 'average'reveals that exposure has not translated into genuine literacy. This is a well-documented phenomenon in mental health education: mass-media and social media exposure generates familiarity with terminology without necessarily building the substantive understanding needed to recognise symptoms, reduce stigma, or seek help appropriately (Gorczynski et al., 2017) [5] . The dominance of social media (68.3%) and informal internet sources (55.1%) as the primary conduits of mental health information, compared to structured institutional channels such as workshops (20.7%), represents a significant quality-control gap. While social media can democratise access to mental health content, it is also an unregulated space prone to oversimplification, stigmatising portrayals, and algorithmically amplified anxiety-provoking content. The low reach of formal university-based communication channels suggests a critical failure of institutional health promotion that goes beyond mere absence of programmes. The identification of academic pressure (76.2%), career uncertainty (66.1%), and family expectations (59.0%) as the dominant stressors maps closely onto the structural characteristics of agricultural higher education in India, where academic demands are intense, employment prospects in the sector are variable, and family investment in education creates a burden of expectation that students carry throughout their studies. The distinct stress peak among second-year students (53.4% 'often/always' stressed) higher than all other year groups including first-year studentsis a finding that merits specific institutional attention and may reflect the loss of orientation-year support structures combined with the full weight of academic demands in the second year.

The most alarming finding of this study is the disjunction between awareness and action in the domain of professional help-seeking. Despite moderately high awareness scores and near-universal recognition of mental health's importance, only 8.4% of distressed students sought support from a professional counsellor. One in four students (23.3%) spoke to no one at all when experiencing distress. This pattern of silent sufferingwell-documented in Western university settings (Hunt & Eisenberg, 2010) [9] is likely amplified in the GBPUAT context by cultural norms of self-reliance, family-centred support preferences, and the persistent stigma that 68.7% of students themselves acknowledge. The fact that 45.8% of students remain unaware of available university mental health servicesincluding 55.2% of fourth-year studentsconfirms that awareness of services www.extensionjournal.com and willingness to use them are both barriers that require simultaneous intervention. The gender disparity in MHAI scores (Female: 4.23, Male: 3.75; difference = +0.48) is consistent with international evidence that female students demonstrate higher mental health literacy, more positive attitudes toward professional help, and lower stigma-related barriers (Hunt et al., 2010) [9] . In a population where male students constitute 59.0% of the total, this gap translates into a population-level unmet need that targeted gender-sensitive programming must address. The social media finding -93.4% perceiving its impact on mental health as real or possiblefurther underlines the need for digital literacy components in university mental health curricula.

Conclusion

This study provides the first systematic empirical examination of mental health awareness and contributing factors among undergraduate students at GBPUAT, Pantnagar. The findings reveal a student population characterised by near-universal exposure but insufficient depth of knowledge, high prevalence of multi-domain stress with a distinctive peak in the second year, significant gender disparities in awareness and attitudes, worrying levels of professional help non-seeking, and inadequate institutional communication of available support services. Mental health at GBPUATas at agricultural universities more broadlycannot be treated as a peripheral welfare issue or an individual responsibility. The data presented in this study make clear that it is a structural concern requiring a coordinated, university-wide response that integrates curricular intervention, peer-based outreach, gendersensitive programming, digital communication strategy, and strengthened professional counselling services. The students surveyed have expressed both the need and the desire for such support: 77.5% agree that universities should provide mental health services. The institutional obligation is now to meet that expectation with meaningful and sustained action.

Recommendations

The following evidence-based recommendations are proposed for institutional implementation:

• Establish a fully staffed, visible, and accessible Mental Health Cell at GBPUAT with at minimum one full-time trained counsellor. Communicate its existence systematically through orientation programmes, departmental inductions, university portal, social media channels, and hostel noticeboards.

• Introduce a mandatory one-credit Mental Health

Literacy module for all first-year students across all programmes, covering stress recognition, coping strategies, help-seeking pathways, and digital wellbeing. • Design and implement a targeted second-year mental health interventionincluding peer mentoring and structured stress management workshopsrecognising this cohort's disproportionately high stress burden (53.4% frequently stressed).

Limitations of the Study

The following limitations are acknowledged. First, convenience sampling limits the representativeness of findings and may introduce selection bias toward students with higher engagement or stronger opinions on mental health. Second, the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference; the positive correlation between MHAI and stress frequency, for example, may reflect reverse causation or a shared third variable. Third, self-reported data are susceptible to social desirability bias, particularly on sensitive topics such as help-seeking and stigma. Fourth, the study is confined to a single institution, restricting direct generalisability to other Indian universities. Fifth, the programme categories, while accurately reflecting the diversity of GBPUAT's student body, involved some interpretive grouping of inconsistently entered responses. Future research should employ validated instruments such as the Mental Health Knowledge Schedule (MAKS) or the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), stratified random sampling, and longitudinal or comparative designs across multiple institutions.

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