The association between religious beliefs and mental health amongst medical students

Objective: To determine the association between religious beliefs (RB) and mental health (MH) among medical students alongwith assessment of correlations of RB and MH with age, gender, marital status and academic success.Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried on 200 randomly selected Muslim medical students of Islamic Azad University-Tehran Medical Branch between June and July 2006. MH and RB were assessed through General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) and the modified validated questionnaire, respectively. Data were analyzed by statistical methods such as Independent Sample T-test, Chi-square and one-way ANOVA methods.P-value 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.Results: Of a total of 200 students, 75 (37.5%) were male and 125 (62.5%) were female with mean age of 18.98± 0.956 years. A statistically significant association was found between RB and MH (P=0.0001). The stronger the RB, the higher the academic success (P=0.017). Similarly a significant association of academic success was also detected with MH (P=0.000). However, there was no association of age, gender and marital status either with RB or MH.Conclusion: Stronger RB results in good mental health and academic progress. However, further investigations are required to achieve more reliable results.