Mental Health In Australia

1680 Words4 Pages

Many university students in Australia are young, and they experience a substantial amount of stressful and challenging situations in their academic life. In Australia, half of the population who have common mental illnesses have their first episode by age eighteen, and three quarters by the age of twenty-five (Kitchener, Jorm, & Kelly, 2017). These statistics show the importance of mental health in University life. According to Cvetkovski, Reavley, and Jorm’s (2012) research on Australian university students, they have a higher occurrence of moderate stress than non-academics. Moreover, the latest National Tertiary Student Wellbeing survey (NTSWS, 2016) conducted on seventy Australian universities concluded that the high levels of psychological …show more content…

Mental health can affect university students’ education, future occupation roles and personal life. It is a critical matter for university students to use effective coping strategies, such as proactive coping to prevent stressors and view them as chances for personal growth (Swinburne online, 2018). In this essay, it will be argued that the five-factor model of personality also knowns as the Big Five is related to proactive coping. This essay will critically evaluate all the research evidence collected to explain not only coping and proactive coping but also personality, especially how the five-factor model of personality relates to proactive coping among university students. The variety of stressors university students face in their academic life will be outlined. Finally, the significance of personality and its influence on proactive coping and coping among university students will be …show more content…

According to Straud, McNaughton-Casill and Fuhrman (2015) proactive coping converts any event, experience, or environmental stimulus that causes stress into personal growth. Therefore, students develop plans in advance to prevent and weaken challenges that arise from stressors. Likewise, preventative coping makes students gather resources to reduce negative consequences of a future event (Drummond & Brough, 2017, p.26) (as cited in Antoniou & Cooper, 2017). The proactive coping has achieved much attention by researchers since Aspinall and Taylor introduced it (1997) in the peer-reviewed article stating that proactive coping has many possible benefits including decreasing the impact of stressors and ability to stop entirely with proactive efforts. Due to which, the researchers started examining the proactive coping phenomena in depth to understand the cause of this behaviour and began to contemplate a proactive coping inventory instrument to measure future orientated coping. As a result, Greenglass, Schwarzer, Jakubiec, Fiksenbaum, and Taubert (1999) created a psychometric tool recognised as proactive coping inventory (PCI) to measure proactive coping. This scale contains seven scales and fifty-five items related to behaviour and cognition using the sample from

More about Mental Health In Australia

Open Document