Medical Students and Personality Traits
In light of the rising suicide rates and evidence of declining mental health among veterinarians, physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and other health professional groups, there seems to be an increased focus on students pursuing careers in these fields.
There is also the fact that it is often suggested that the majority of these students may have personality traits that make them vulnerable to mental ill health. Therefore, we present a study that aims to explore the relationship between the Big Five personality traits, perfectionism, and mental health in UK students completing undergraduate courses in veterinary medicine, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and law.
The study.
A total of 1,744 students studying veterinary medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and law in the UK completed an online questionnaire to determine the relationship between Big Five personality traits (NEO-FFI), perfectionism (Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale), happiness (Warwick), and psychological distress (General Health Questionnaire-12), depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II), and suicidal ideation and attempts. Data on the following were collected.
Results.
Veterinary, medical, and dental students were significantly more favorable than law students, but veterinary students had the lowest perfectionism scores of the five groups studied. High levels of neuroticism and low integrity predicted an increase in mental disorders in each student population.
In conclusion, the study showed that there is no evidence for any of the personality trait stories that are told anecdotally.
Lewis, E.G., Cardwell, J.M. The big five personality traits, perfectionism and their association with mental health among UK students on professional degree programmes. BMC Psychol 8, 54 (2020). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00423-3
Conclusion
The results of this study negate the anecdotal evidence of what it says about those who aspire to be in the medical field, as the results did not show a significantly higher level of neuroticism associated with mental health problems.
Within the medical field, students of medicine, veterinary medicine, and law were found to have a higher propensity for openness than students of dentistry and pharmacy, suggesting a link between high openness and depression. It has been suggested that openness is associated with prolonged existing depression due to imagination, intellectual curiosity, inner feelings and experiences, which can lead to "over-attention" to others.
The results also show that most medical students are high in extraversion traits, while pharmacy students are low. There was no significant difference in integrity, but some studies have shown that nursing students tend to have lower integrity, so it is not surprising that conscientiousness traits such as discipline and organization were higher in medical students.
Although some people may have the impression that there are a lot of eccentric people, the results of this study, although limited, suggest that people who are prone to mental health problems do not necessarily want to go into medicine, and if they do have mental health problems, it is probably because of their workplace.
