Benefit of meditation for the mental health of university students: a systematic review

INTRODUCTION: Anxiety, stress and depression are currently the main symptoms of mental health problems presented by university students, it is estimated that about one third of this population presents some of these symptoms. OBJECTIVE: To analyse the clinical evidence on the benefits of meditation on the mental health of university students through a systematic review. METHODOLOGY: We identified randomised controlled trials on the effects of meditation on mental health in university students, written in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and published between 2018 and 2022. We excluded quasi-randomised trials, non-randomised trials, observational studies, clinical trial protocols, preliminary studies, studies that do not have meditation as the main intervention, reports and articles without access to the full text. The searches were conducted in November 2022, in the databases: Embase; LILACS; MedLine/PubMed; SciELO and; The Cochrane Library. The RoB 2 tool was used to assess the risk of bias and the articles were subjected to a qualitative synthesis analysis. RESULTS: Nineteen articles were selected on mindfulness practices with 2054 participants. Most studies analysed outcomes on stress, depression, anxiety and mindfulness, and the others on quality of life, life satisfaction and self-compassion. The studies were divided into three thematic categories: asynchronous interventions (8); synchronous online interventions (4); face-to-face interventions (7). DISCUSSION: In general, the results express improvements in clinical symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, as well as promoting mindfulness in university students. Meditation is a health practice that can be promoted by video calls, podcasts or videos and can reach distance learning students, since online initiatives seem to be very effective compared to face-to-face interventions. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: The results of this review contribute to the evidence that meditation, especially mindfulness, can benefit the mental health of university students by reducing symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, as well as improving mindfulness. These results appear to be forthcoming whether through face-to-face or online encounters, synchronously or asynchronously. This allows for a wide range of application possibilities in the health of university students. Further studies are needed to evaluate the medium- and long-term effects, as well as to analyse and compare the characteristics, effectiveness and applicability of meditation applied in person, online synchronously or asynchronously.