WHO World Mental Health Surveys International College Student Project: Prevalence and distribution of mental disorders.

In the paper

“An earlier WMH report based on face-to-face interviews with the subset of WMH household survey respondents in 21 countries who were college students found somewhat lower lifetime (29.3%) and 12-month (25.2%) prevalence estimates of any disorder in mostly high-income countries, but this result was based on a wider range of DSM-IV disorders and on most in-depth assessments of these disorders than in”

What the sources say

• Disputed

  Split into 2 atoms — 0 confirmed, 1 partially supported, 1 disputed, 0 misattributed, 0 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

  Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

  cites Auerbach et al 2016 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured

In the paper

“the number of students in need of treatment for these disorders far exceeds the resources of most counseling centers, resulting in substantial unmet need for treatment of mental disorders among college students (Auerbach, et al., 2016; Beiter et al., 2015; Storrie, Ahern, & Tuckett,”

What the sources say

• Partly supported

  The Results section reports that only 16.4% of college students with 12-month disorders received minimally adequate treatment, supporting substantial unmet treatment need. The Discussion also notes limited outpatient provider availability in lower-income countries, but the paper does not establish that demand exceeds the capacity of most college counseling centers or that counseling-center capacity causes the treatment gap. No page numbers were provided in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)

  cites Auerbach, et al., 2016 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
• Partly supported

  The Discussion (4; page not provided) says the prevalence of symptoms indicates a need to increase the number and scope of treatment programs. It does not establish that students needing treatment far outnumber the resources of most counseling centers or quantify unmet treatment need. (LLM, conf=0.84)

  cites Beiter et al., 2015 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Storrie, Ahern, & Tuckett, 2010

In the paper

“it is associated with substantial impairment in academic performance (Auerbach et al., 2016; Bruffaerts et al., 2018) as well as suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Mortier et al., in press).”

What the sources say

• Partly supported

  Auerbach et al. is cited for the academic-performance part of the sentence; the separate citation to Mortier et al. accompanies the suicidal-thoughts-and-behaviors part. The Abstract Results and the Results section on college attrition associate pre-matriculation disorders with leaving college, an adverse educational outcome, but do not establish impairment in academic performance such as grades or coursework. (LLM, conf=0.84)

  cites Auerbach et al., 2016 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
• Supported

  The Discussion reports that freshmen with mental health problems had significantly lower academic functioning, averaging a 2.9–4.7% decrease in academic-year performance compared with those without such problems. The suicidal-thoughts-and-behaviors clause is attached to a different citation, so it is not part of the claim attributed to Bruffaerts et al. (2018). (LLM, conf=0.93)

  cites Bruffaerts et al., 2018 source
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Mortier et al., in press

In the paper

“One-fifth of college students in those surveys had 12-month DSM-IV/CIDI disorders, with anxiety and mood disorders the most common class of disorders.”

What the sources say

• Supported

  The Results section reports that 20.3% of college students had a 12-month DSM-IV/CIDI disorder. It also identifies anxiety disorders as the most prevalent class across the groups studied, followed by mood disorders. (LLM, conf=0.93)

  cites Auerbach, et al., 2016 source

In the paper

“It is unlikely in light of this that college campuses will have sufficient resources to support student needs for mental health services, exacerbating the problems that already exist in the mental health treatment system of escalating financial expenses and long waitlists (Andersson & Titov, 2014; Webb, Rosso, & Rauch, 2017).”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Andersson & Titov, 2014 source
• Partly supported

  The Introduction (page not provided) identifies treatment costs and long wait-lists as barriers to mental health care. It does not address whether college campuses will have sufficient resources to meet student needs, or say that costs and wait-lists are escalating. (LLM, conf=0.85)

  cites Webb, Rosso, & Rauch, 2017 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured

In the paper

“These associations have typically been found to be small, but with women having higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders than men, men having higher rates of substance use disorders than women, and socio-economic background being inversely related to prevalence of all disorders (Chen & Jacobson, 2012; Eisenberg, Hunt, & Speer, 2013).”

What the sources say

• Partly supported

  Split into 2 atoms — 0 confirmed, 1 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 1 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

  cites Chen & Jacobson, 2012 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Eisenberg, Hunt, & Speer, 2013

In the paper

“Second, only six common mental disorders were assessed in the surveys. The omission of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder are especially noteworthy because of their comparatively high prevalence in the WMH surveys (Auerbach et al., 2016)”

What the sources say

• Partly supported

  The Method > Measures section lists ADHD, phobias, PTSD, conduct disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder among the disorders assessed in the WMH surveys. The Results section reports that phobias were among the most prevalent individual disorders, but our copy does not assess eating disorders or establish comparatively high prevalence for every disorder listed. The statement that only six disorders were assessed appears to concern the citing authors’ surveys, not the WMH surveys. (LLM, conf=0.85)

  cites Auerbach et al., 2016 sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured

In the paper

“Syndromes typically had onsets in early-middle adolescence and persisted into the year of the survey.”

In the paper

“Although relatively modest, the strongest correlates of screening positive were older age, female sex, unmarried-deceased parents, no religious affiliation, non-heterosexual identification and behavior, low secondary school ranking, and”

In the paper

“preliminary analyses reported below showed that the majority of the 50 remaining students who identified either as transgender or “other” rather than as male or female endorsed a number of mental disorders and experienced considerable impairment, leading us to focus on them in a separate report.”

In the paper

“Most of these students came from the Australian sample and were older, full-time employed people who would normally be expected to access mental health services, if they were needed, through their employer or employer-sponsored health insurance rather than through their college.”

In the paper

“extrinsically motivated (as compared to intrinsically motivated) students and students with lower high school rankings (relative to students with higher high school rankings) had elevated odds of mental disorders.”

In the paper

“Prevalence was similar for the additional respondents excluded because of missing information on gender or full-time student status (35.9%) and because of being part-time (41.2%), whereas the students who self-identified as either transgender or “other” had much higher lifetime prevalence of any disorder (76.5%).”

In the paper

“Median age-of-onset was 14.2 years of age, from a high of 14.6 in Spain to a low of 13.6 in the U.S.”

In the paper

“We found a number of socio-demographic and college-related variables that had statistically significant but substantively modest associations (OR=1.4–1.5) with overall disorder prevalence: being female, having parents who were not married or deceased, having no religious affiliation, graduating in the bottom 70% of their high school class, and having primarily extrinsic reasons for going to”

In the paper

“The vast majority (89.0%) of respondents with a lifetime disorder had 12-month prevalence, from a high of 94.2% in Northern Ireland to a low of 83.3% in Spain.”

In the paper

“Median proportional annual persistence (i.e., the proportion of years in episode between age-of-onset and age at interview) was 65.0%, from a high of 72.2% in the U.S. to a low of 50.3% in Mexico.”

In the paper

“Major depressive disorder (MDD) was the most common of the disorders examined across all countries combined (21.2% lifetime prevalence; 18.5% 12-month prevalence) followed by generalized anxiety disorder (18.6–16.7%) (Table 3).”

In the paper

“Each institution received ethics approval to participate in the project and all participants provided consent.”

In the paper

“one-third of students have one or more of the 12-month disorders considered here and other disorders that we did not consider are likely to be present among a substantial number of other students.”

In the paper

“it also may be that (a) our assessment reflects an imbalanced assessment of internalizing versus externalizing disorders but (b) perhaps more critically, the assessment of these disorders is conducted before their peak period of onset.”

In the paper

“in both NCS-R and NESEARC, median age-of-onset for major depression (Hasin et al., 2005) and mood disorders (Kessler et al., 2005) was ~30 years compared to ~14 years within the WMH-ICS sample.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Hasin et al., 2005 source
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Kessler et al., 2005

In the paper

“Item-level missing data in the completed surveys were imputed using the method of multiple imputation (MI) by chained equations (van Buuren, 2012).”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites van Buuren, 2012 source

In the paper

“The response rates were quite variable across countries, from a low of 7.0% in Australia to a high of 79.3% in Mexico. The weighted (by achieved sample size) mean response rate across all surveys was 45.5%.”

In the paper

“both sets of surveys documented that most lifetime mental disorders among college students started prior to college entrance and that persistence of these disorders was very high, suggesting that clinical interventions early in the college career might be warranted.”

In the paper

“There also is strong reason to believe that rates of disorders, particularly externalizing disorders (e.g., substance use disorder) and serious mental illness (e.g., bipolar disorder, thought disorders), will show higher prevalence during later college years.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Arnett, 2005 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Sussman & Arnett, 2014 source

In the paper

“Indeed, substance use disorders, bipolar disorder, and thought disorders typically emerge in the early-to-mid 20s, and the typical college lifestyle—irregular sleep, increased interpersonal stress, experimental substance use—may confer increased risk of disorder onset (Arnett, 2005; Sussman & Arnett, 2014).”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Arnett, 2005 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Sussman & Arnett, 2014 source

In the paper

“However, these validation studies have not yet been carried out in samples of college students.”

In the paper

“The version of the AUDIT we used, which defined alcohol use disorder as either a total score of 8+ or a score of 4+ on the AUDIT dependence questions (Babor, Higgins-Biddle, Saunders, & Monteiro, 2001), has been shown to have concordance with clinical diagnoses in the range AUC = 0.78–0.91 (Reinert & Allen, 2002).”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Babor, Higgins-Biddle, Saunders, & Monteiro, 2001
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Reinert & Allen, 2002 source

In the paper

“Of note, the majority of WMH-ICS respondents were aged 18–19 years, and this necessarily impacts the interpretation of age-of-onset.”

In the paper

“the response rates in the college surveys were quite variable and were lower overall than in the nationally representative face-to-face community household surveys in the WMH initiative.”

In the paper

“it is likely that more than one-third of our respondents suffered from significant distress and that fewer than the one-third suffered from a serious mental disorder.”

In the paper

“Nor do we know if calibration studies in separate countries would show that concordance of the structured questions in our diagnostic screens are equally valid in all countries.”

In the paper

“although the surveys used well-validated screening scales calibrated to yield unbiased prevalence estimates in general population samples, calibration studies have not yet been carried out in samples of college students.”

In the paper

“A number of internet-based interventions exist for a broad range of psychiatric disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, eating disorders) and associated problems (e.g., sleep, stress) and have been shown to be effective for both prevention and treatment of these conditions (e.g., Ebert et al., 2015; Josephine, Josefine, Philipp, David, & Harald, 2017; Olthuis, Watt, Bailey, Hayden, & Stewart, 2015;”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Ebert et al., 2015
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Josephine, Josefine, Philipp, David, & Harald, 2017 source
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Olthuis, Watt, Bailey, Hayden, & Stewart, 2015

In the paper

“Fourth, lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset were assessed retrospectively, which may contribute to downward biases given recall errors.”

In the paper

“therefore, the true prevalence of mental disorders among college students is likely to be a good deal higher than reported in the current study; particularly as we are only including first-years students who are not yet through the high-risk periods for many common disorders.”

In the paper

“sub-threshold cases are known to have substantial impairment (Cuijpers, de Graaf, & van Dorsselaer, 2004; Fergusson, Horwood, Ridder, & Beautrais, 2005) and to benefit from internet-based interventions (Andersson & Cuijpers, 2009; Spek et al., 2008); potentially reducing the incidence of threshold cases (Buntrock et al., 2016).”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cuijpers, de Graaf, & van Dorsselaer, 2004
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Fergusson, Horwood, Ridder, & Beautrais, 2005 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Andersson & Cuijpers, 2009 source

In the paper

“First, the cross-national prevalence estimates are based on a convenience sample of colleges with relatively low and quite variable response rates, limiting generalizability of results.”