Citation

Shor R. Community Ment. Health J. 2016; 53(3): 281-287.

Affiliation

The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel. ron.shor@mail.huji.ac.il.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10597-016-0026-2

PMID

27299921

Abstract

Knowledge about the difficulties students with severe mental illness (SMI) encounter is essential to helping them meet the challenges of studying in universities. Therefore, a study was conducted in Israel with 80 university students with SMI to ascertain their difficulties and the relationship between these difficulties and their level of recovery. The two subscales of an instrument measuring students' difficulties that were ranked the highest were "Learning Skills and Management of Academic Tasks" and "Social Inclusion Difficulties." Inverse relationships were found between the students' difficulties and their perceived level of recovery. The findings illuminate that one of the major challenges that students with SMI experience is to meet academic requirements while coping with mental illness. They also indicate that students' difficulties may not be limited to academic functioning. Therefore, there is a need to broaden the view of students' difficulties to include social and contextual factors in the university environment.

Language: en