International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health | July 2021 | Vol 8 | Issue 7 Page 3400 International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health Das BN et al. Int J Community Med Public Health. 2021 Jul;8(7):3400-3405 http://www.ijcmph.com pISSN2394-6032 | eISSN 2394-6040 Original Research Article Study of stress, anxiety, depression and coping strategies among nursing students in a tertiary care teaching hospital, South India Biranchi Narayan Das, Anu Mohandas*, Saba Syed INTRODUCTION Nursing students are at extremely high risk for experiencing increased levels of stress, anxiety, and depression due to their varied circumstances. 1-3 The transition from adolescent to adult life, away from home support system, adjusting to new environment, academic expectations, obligation to succeed, dealing with patients and their relatives, uncertainties regarding future, financial pressure, perceived Low self-esteem, etc are found to be the contributing factors. 4-10 Stress during the academic years is the major factor of anxiety and depression among nursing students. Indian studies conducted in Delhi and Rajasthan had revealed moderate degree of stress present among 77% and 82% of nursing students respectively. 11,12 Stress is the negative feelings and beliefs that occur whenever people feel unable to cope with demands from their environment. Anxiety is an ABSTRACT Background: Nursing students are at extremely high risk for experiencing stress, anxiety, and depression due to their varied circumstances. Indian studies has revealed, moderate stress among 77-82% of nursing students. The better the nursing students can manage their stress and anxiety and adopt healthy coping strategy, the more successful they can be in their clinical training and academic performance. Objective of the current study was to estimate the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress among the BSc nursing students and its association with socio-demographic and academic factors and to find the coping strategies adopted by them. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among 149BSc nursing students in a teaching hospital in Hyderabad. The data was collected by pre-validated questionnaire with 3 parts. Part I: socio-demographic and academic parameters, part II: psychological information (DASS-21) and part III: coping strategies (brief COPE). Data was analysed using SPSS version 24.The percentages of stress, anxiety and depression was found and categorised to mild, moderate, severe and extremely severe and associations analyzed with Chi-square test. The mean score and percentages were calculated for coping strategies. Results: The mean age of nursing students was 20±1.6 years. The proportion having depression, anxiety and stress were 67.7%, 85.3% and 46.9% respectively. The coping strategies ‘used a lot’ were spirituality (43.6%), Information support (30.9%) and active coping (28.2%). The study showed depression (p=0.05) and stress (p=0.002) to be higher among 2 nd and 4 th year students. Lack of leisure time (p=0.036) and difficulty in academics (p= 0.017) were identified as stressors. Conclusions: This study noted high levels of psychological disturbances among nursing students. There is urgent need to plan stress management programmes with peer instructors, mentorship, more leisure and outdoor learning activities. Keywords: Depression, Anxiety, Stress, Coping strategy, Nursing students Department of Community Medicine, Apollo Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Hyderabad, Telangana, India Received: 04 May 2021 Revised: 03 June 2021 Accepted: 04 June 2021 *Correspondence: Dr. Anu Mohandas, E-mail: anumohandas88@gmail.com Copyright: © the author(s), publisher and licensee Medip Academy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20212594