An examination of factors related to mental health in high school students : focusing on students attending specialized departments

In today’s stressful society, factors affecting the mental health of high school students include relationships, parent-child relationships, lifestyle, and stress coping skills. These factors affect students’ sense of adjustment to the school they attend and are related to school maladjustment, such as non-attendance and dropout. Today, the issue of school maladjustment among high school students is a hot topic. Unlike elementary and junior high school students, high school students are not in a compulsory education program, so non-attendance among high school students leads to insufficient attendance, which in turn leads to failure to complete a degree, which in turn leads to retention and dropout problems. According to a 2021 survey of dropouts by department, the number of students who dropped out of school was on a rising trend among all departments, especially in the specialized and general departments, as opposed to the general department. On the other hand, the ideal amount of sleep for 14- to 17-year-olds is said to be 8 to 10 hours, but according to a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office, the actual amount of sleep for high school students is less than 7 hours. In this study, we explored the factors that influence students’ mental health, as well as the early detection and treatment of students with poor mental health, focusing on schools with specialized departments, where truancy and dropout tend to be high, and examining the presence or absence of subjective stress. Hypothesis 1: “Lifestyle, relationships, parent-child relationships, and stress coping skills influence the mental health of high school students. Hypothesis 2: “Attendance is a factor in the early detection and early response to mental health conditions and changes in high school students at school. The following findings were obtained from the study. As a result, the following findings were obtained. The presence or absence of self-perceived stress was found to have an influence on items such as “career path after high school” and “satisfaction with reasons for applying to school” (Tables 1 and 2). In addition, there were significant differences between the scores for “stress reduction methods” and the factors affecting all scales, including lifestyle, stress coping skills, mental health, school satisfaction, and parent-child relation-ships. Significant differences were also found between scores on the “satisfaction with reasons for applying” scale, with the exception of stress coping skills (Table 3). Next, in examining the hypotheses, lifestyle habits and stress coping skills were identified as influencing the mental health of high school students for hypothesis 1 (Figure 1). The parent-child relationship was found to have a significant effect on lifestyle, stress coping skills, and school satisfaction. Furthermore, the relationship between lifestyle and school satisfaction was shown to be mutually influential. Hypothesis 2 then revealed that mental health had no effect on attendance, but both parent-child relationship and lifestyle significantly affected absenteeism among attendance. In addition, parent-child relationship was found to have a significant effect on tardiness. In summary, we found that several factors familiar to students, such as the availability of stress reduction methods, satisfaction with the reason for applying to high school, and lifestyle, were identified as factors af-fecting the mental health of students attending high schools for specialized studies. In addition, based on the results of Hypothesis 1, the effectiveness of focusing on attendance as an aid in noticing changes in students’ mental health was confirmed.