Mental Health And Quality Of Life Of Graduate Level Therapy Students: A Look At The Role Of Coping

Abstract

Graduate students in therapist training programs have been found to struggle with high rates of mental health distress such as depression, anxiety and stress impacting their mental health and their quality of life. Despite these challenges, some graduate therapy students have reported high levels of wellness and quality of life. This study explores the mental health, quality of life, and coping patterns and strategies in 165 Canadian graduate level therapist trainees. Results indicate that graduate students overall reported lower mental health and quality of life than the general population. When comparing level of training, both master’s and doctoral students reported experiencing similar levels of quality of life, however, master’s students reported experiencing significantly more mental health distress. In terms of coping, both groups of students reported significant correlations between avoidant emotional coping patterns and each of the outcome measures. Self-blame significantly predicted mental health outcomes and quality of life for master’s level students, while substance use was significantly associated to outcomes for doctoral level students. In terms of spiritual coping, for master’s students, but not doctoral students, negative spiritual coping was associated to lower mental health and lower quality of life while forgiveness was significantly positively associated to mental health and quality of life. After controlling for other coping strategies however, only forgiveness significantly predicted mental health, possibly acting as a buffer for the effects of negative spiritual coping. Implications of these findings and recommendations for therapists in training and training programs are discussed.