High-level social support alleviates the negative effect of life stress on postgraduate students’ mental health during campus enclosed management of the COVID-19 Omicron pandemic

Mental health problems, especially anxiety and depression, during the pandemic caused by Omicron variant have aroused a great concern. The drastic change in daily routine leads to a higher level of life stress. Since postgraduate students usually have worse mental health problems, they could be vulnerable to life stress. Social support would be a protective factor against depression and anxiety, and might play a moderating role between life stress and these mental health indices.

This study is to explore the relationship between life stress and mental health, and how social support alleviates such relationship.

A set of online questionnaires, including (1) items of 11 points visual analog scale (VAS) to measure postgraduate students’ current life stress and social support, (2) Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), and (3) Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), was handed out to postgraduate students from several universities in Shanghai. Data of 110 postgraduate students were collected and analyzed. Pearson correlations and mediate effect tests were conducted to verify the potential relationship.

(1) Life stress was positively correlated with the level of anxiety and depression. Social support was negatively correlated with life stress and the level of anxiety and depression. (2) The interaction between social support level and life stress played a significant role in predicting anxiety level (β = –0.020, p = 0.044). The interaction between social support level and life stress also predicted the level of depression (β = –0.025, p = 0.009).

High-level social support had effectively mitigated the steep slope between the restrained life stress and mental health, which indicated that more available social support would be promising to alleviate the risk of anxiety and depression during the static management period.