2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The importance of mental health has been increasingly clear in the fields of academics and professional development in recent years. It is a well-known fact that people of various backgrounds and occupations can experience mental health problems that negatively affect their general well-being. This fact is not an exception for engineering students, who struggle with the demanding requirements of their courses and the unwavering quest for perfection. Sometimes, the rigorous demands of engineering school can have a negative impact on students' mental health. It is for this reason that they must place a high priority on self-care practices that include their emotional, psychological, and social needs in addition to their academic goals. Important elements of this self-care routine include regular exercise, eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, and taking pauses from intense study to partake in enjoyable and relaxing activities.

Though the significance of mental health for engineering students' academic and professional lives is increasingly acknowledged, there is still a large research vacuum regarding a thorough understanding and recommendations for this group of students. While there is a wealth of general research on mental health and well-being, little of it focuses on the particular pressures, coping strategies, and support networks that engineering students must deal with. The purpose of our planned systematic literature review (SLR) is to close this knowledge gap by analyzing the body of research and pinpointing areas in which more study is required to fully address the mental health requirements of engineering students. The main inquiry that will steer our comprehensive literature evaluation is: What are the present conditions, patterns, and prospects for mental health research in engineering?

The SLR process comprises of three phases: identification, screening, and synthesis. In the identification phase, search terms including (mental health + engineering, mental illness + engineering, depression + engineering, anxiety + engineering, and well-being + engineering) were put in several databases to retrieve the articles. The databases include Google Scholar, Web of Science, IEEE Explorer, Engineering Village, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, and Wiley Online Library. A total of 3008 articles were retrieved. Next, in the screening phase, the articles were first screened by abstract, and 2775 articles were removed. The 233 articles were then screened by full text. The screening was done following the exclusion criteria (EC): EC1: Articles published in languages other than English; EC2: Articles published before 2014; EC3: Articles lacking a clear focus on engineering; EC4: Articles not directly addressing mental health, encompassing mental illness, depression, anxiety, well-being, and anxiety disorders; EC5: Articles that include content relevant to both engineers and non-engineers; EC6: Articles that do not present experimental data; and EC7: Articles primarily focusing on graduate students. The research team is currently reviewing the articles and will complete the analysis in a few weeks. More details on the preliminary findings and the themes emerging from the synthesis of the information from the reviewed articles will be presented in the full paper.