Context:

Common Mental Disorders (CMD) cause intense psychological distress, loss of quality of life and social problems, being frequent among university students.

Objective:

To investigate the prevalence of CMD among nursing students in relation to sociodemographic, academic and COVID-19 pandemic aspects, and to describe forms of relief/management in mental health in these students' perception.

Methods:

Descriptive, quantitative study carried out with undergraduate nursing students from a university in southern Bahia, Brazil. Data were collected from an electronic questionnaire, which included the Self Reporting Questionaire-20 (SRQ-20). In the association analyses, the Prevalence Ratio (PR) with a Confidence Interval (CI) of 95% was calculated. The level of significance used was p<0.05.

Results:

146 students participated in the study, with a mean age of 23.6 years. The prevalence of CMD was 68.5% and was associated with female gender, self-declared indigenous race, history of confinement, failure in discipline and irregular status in the course, and a feeling of incapacity for the future due to the COVID-19 pandemic . It was observed that 67.1% of the students used some form of mental health management, and they perceived psychological support, psychotropic drugs and music therapy as therapeutic, among other strategies.

Conclusions:

The study evidenced a high prevalence of CMD among students, in the context of the pandemic, and describes forms of mental health management of (possible) use of them, which can serve as a subsidy for the elaboration of strategies for the prevention of psychological distress and promotion of mental health by universities.