Abstract

Introduction & Objective: Students in each society are considered the most important forces influencing the development of the country. The prevalence of any mental disorders among them can lead to waste of material and spiritual investments. Therefore, the present study was conducted to identify the importance of social factors' role in mental health as well as the relationship between perceived social support and resilience with mental health of students.& para;& para;Materials and Methods: The statistical population included 1,900 undergraduate bachelor students at Zabol University of Medical Science during the academic year of 1997-98. In this research, 500 students were selected by stratified sampling from the whole society and evaluated using the 12 general health questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the multidimensional perceived social support scale (MSPSS). For data analysis, in addition to descriptive statistics, inferential statistics methods were used including: the Pearson correlation coefficient, t-tests and analysis of variance (ANOVA) by SPSS software and linear regression analysis using State software.& para;& para;Results: The findings of this study showed that there was a significant correlation between social support and mental health (P <0.0001). Among the social sup- port sub-scales, social protection of the family, social support of the most important individuals in their lives and social support of the friends were mostly related to mental health, respectively (P <0.0001).& para;& para;Conclusion: The findings of the study showed that mental health of students improved with increasing their perceptions of social support, and their mental health was compromised by decreasing the sources of support.