Online Seminar : A Potential Mental Health Support Tool for International Students

Since 2020, university students in Japan are exposed to the impacts of Covid-19 pandemic. Data from a survey had shown that over 50% of international students had been experiencing some kind of stress (Tran, unpublished). For supporting international students in the prolonged pandemic period, we conducted a series of Stress Prevention Seminars during 2021. These seminars were designed for students to learn simple skills that could help them to cope with various stresses. Records of the seminars, including students’ interactions, Q&A, feedback, emotion score (Ogawa, 2000) and final evaluation were analyzed. This presentation is aiming to show: (1) preliminary results of the seminars conducted; and (2) potential of these events for strengthening mental health status of international students during pandemic. The results showed high understanding level and satisfaction rate, as well as inreased positive emotion score. The results suggested that providing these stress prevention seminars to international students is potentially to be an effective strategy, in addition to providing individual counseling and other activities, to improving stress resilience of international students for long term.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)