Prevalence and predictors of psychological distress among school students in Delhi

Background: The health of the school children in adolescence period has a lot of implications for health problems in adults. Adolescents suffer from psychological problems at one time or the other during their development. Many of these problems are of transient nature and are often not noticed.Objectives: To study the prevalence of the psychological distress and to find out the relationship between various sociodemographic variables of the students and psychological distress. Methodology: Crosssectional examination 9 and 10 class students to find the prevalence of psychological distress by using GHQ-12 in East Delhi schools from November 2009 to December 2010. The sample size was 400.Statistical analysis of the data was done on the SPSS software version 16 by using cross tabulation with the chi-square test. Binary logistical regression was applied to determine the predictors.Results: Majority of the students were in the age group of 14&15 which was around 79%. Around 22% of the study population had some psychological problem, among which 15.75% were having evidence of some stress and 6.25% had severe problem. Among all the predictors class was the only significant