Abstract
Veterinary medicine is known to be a high-stress profession, with students and practitioners worldwide reporting elevated levels of psychological distress. In Pakistan, where livestock and agriculture are central to the economy, veterinarians hold a critically important role. Yet, their work is often culturally undervalued, a dynamic that may deeply affect the mental well-being of students training in this field. This study examines how personal factor like self-perception and emotional sharing in these unique cultural settings.
The research had two primary aims: first, to create and validate a new tool specially designed to measure the psychological and social challenges faced by Pakistani veterinary students; and second, to understand how a student’s self-view and their tendency to share emotions relate to their mental health.
We surveyed 282 final-year veterinary and master’s students from public universities in Punjab. `Alongside standard psychological measures, we developed and tested a new scale based on interviews with students themselves. The analysis confirmed the new scale’s effectiveness, revealing two core areas of difficulty for students: internal psychosomatic distress and external interpersonal and work-related strain.
The findings pinpoint a clear pattern: students with a more negative view of them reported significantly higher levels of both specific psychosocial problems and general distress. While sharing emotions was common, it was not directly linked to better mental health in this sample. A critical finding was that holding a negative self-concept emerged as the strongest predictor of poor mental health outcomes. The social context mattered too students from joint family systems tended to have a more positive self-concept, and veterinary students overall were more open with their emotions than their peers in human medicine. Interestingly, factors like where a student lived or their parents’ education level did not influence their reported distress.