ABSTRACT
Human-being has been frequently exposed to countless situations which he/she need to adapt
himself/herself to – external demand and pressure coming from family, social environment,
work/school, or environment -, upwards he/she is required in responsibilities, obligations,
self- criticism, physiological and psychological difficulties. These are the factors which have
leaded to two illness of actuality: stress and depression. Brazilian researches about stress and
depression and their relation to academic performance and to the college students’ lives are
still scanty if compared to international scientific production about this subject, despite of the
increment that has occurred in the last years. It’s known that academic life approaches the
student to society’s requirements in which concerns to professional and citizen actuation,
demanding efficiency, adaptation to new situations, and the dealing with external pressure and
acceptance. It’s believed that graduation has gotten more stressing, more competitive, and
people have difficulty in financing it. Therefore, many students are obligated to conjugate
work with study. So stress as depression influence in students’ academic production and
performance, because they debilitate the young person’s reasoning capacity, memorization,
motivation and interest in relation to teach-learning process. The proposal of this work is
correlate the stress index with the depression intensity in college students. This study occurred
in a University Center, in a private Superior Education Institute (SEI). In this research, 85
academics of the Biological Sciences, Physical Education and Nursing Course were involved.
All of them from both sex and of the age group from 17 to 41 years old, belonging to diurnal
and nocturnal turns. With the theoretical support gotten from the revision of literature, it was
proceeded the use of following investigation instruments: the Term of Free Clarified
Agreement, the Social-demographic Questionnaire, the List Stress Symptoms – LSS/VAS, e
Beck Depression Inventory – BDI, which were submitted to statistic analysis and confection
of graphics. For that, it was used the following programs: Graph Pad PRISM3, version 3.02;
Microsoft Office Excel 2004, e Qui-quadrado to the calculus of significance. This analysis try
to check the general level of stress and the depression intensity of the total sample, as well the
as the relation between the level of stress and the depression intensity of the total sample with
the social-demographic variables; to identify the most and the least frequent stress symptoms
in the total sample and in each course; to check in which dimensions (physiological,
emotional, cognitive and social), it is concentrated the highest stress level of college students;
to check the correlation between the principal variables. The general sample demonstrates that
it is General Level of Stress Medium-High. The stress dimension that most overload the
characters is the emotional variable. It was also verified that 60% of the general sample didn’t
present depression and 40% have light and moderate depression. The symptoms of depression
point to the tendency to someone annoy oneself, fatigue, high level of personal requirement,
worry about physical problems and sadness. The correlation between stress and depression
found in this sample is negative. Deeper studies are essential to the comprehension of stress
and, mainly, of depression in college students.
Key-words: Stress, depression, college students.