Neighborhood disadvantage, household chaos, and personal stressors: exploring early-life contextual factors and current mental health symptoms in college students

Using Bronfenbrenner's socio-ecological model as a frame, we explored the impact of neighborhood disadvantage, household chaos, and personal stressors on current mental health symptoms in college students. 144 students at a large, public university in the southern U.S. Participants completed measures of demographics, family-of-origin household chaos, stressors, anxiety, and depression, and provided their childhood home ZIP code. Using U.S. Census Data, four structural indicators of neighborhood disadvantage were extracted and appended to each participant's ZIP code. Hierarchical regression revealed that all three variables predicted anxiety symptoms. However, only household chaos and personal stressors predicted current depressive symptoms. Unexpectedly, greater neighborhood disadvantage predicted lower levels of current anxiety. Mediation analyses demonstrated that personal stressors partially mediated the relationships between household chaos and mental health symptoms. College administration and counseling centers may wish to consider pre-college factors that influence college students' current anxious and depressive symptoms.