Prevalence of depression and its correlates among undergraduate health science students in Mogadishu, Somalia: a cross-sectional study

Abstract
Background Depression among undergraduate health science students is increasingly recognized as a significant
public health issue globally. These students face immense academic pressure, often leading to stress and mental
exhaustion, particularly for students studying in a humanitarian crisis situation. However, there is a scarcity of infor
mation in this regard in higher education institutions in Somalia. Hence, this investigation was conducted to assess
the prevalence of depression and its correlates health science students in Somalia.

Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on 321 health science students from some universities in Moga
dishu, Somalia. The data was collected from students studying medicine, nursing and midwifery, laboratory science
and public health at SIMAD university, Banadir university, Mogadishu university and Jamhuriya university, all located
in Mogadishu. Simple random sampling based on class list was used to select the participants and a web-based
self-administered Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) was used to screen for depression. The collected data
were cleaned and checked for completeness before exporting into SPSS version 27 Statistical software for analysis,
where descriptive statistics as well as logistic regression analysis was done to determine the independent predictors
of the outcome variable. Significant association was determined at a 95% confidence interval and p-value < 0.05.

Result The prevalence of depression among the students was 58.6%. A total of 41.5% (133/321) of the participants
were free from depression (Normal), while 30.8% had mild depression, 27.1% had moderate depression and 0.6%
had severe depression. Analysis of the association between the sociodemographic variables and depressive state
of the participant showed statistical significance (p-value = 0.045) for course of study. Students studying nursing
and midwifery had the highest case of depression with 68.6% (59/86), followed by public health 66.7% (30/45),
laboratory science 52.3% (34/65), and medicine having the least number of depressed students with 52.0% students
(65/125). Similarly, gender of students was also found to be statistically significant (p-value = 0.001) with female stu
dents having 65% depression which is 41.1% of the total students studied.

Conclusion The prevalence of depression among health science students in Mogadishu was high and positively
associated with gender, having trouble with authorities, emotional problems, as well as experience of sexual abuse