Mental health of first year college students from the psychoanalytic approach of Cencillo

Abstract

There is a scarcity of studies taking a psychoanalytic perspective on college students’ psychological adjustment. Our aim was to assess the degree of psychological adjustment of one hundred and thirty seven first-year college students using assessment tools from different psychological orientations: Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and Goldberg Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28). In addition, we used ISMOS (Ortiz & Sedano, 2012) a recently constructed questionnaire which evaluates the psychological adjustment according to Cencillo's psychoanalytic principles. Significant and medium-high associations were obtained between measures. A small but significant group of first year students presented higher scores denoting psychological distress.