Second, psychological distress in early adulthood is associated with adverse short-term outcomes, such as poor college attendance, performance, engagement, and completion (e.g., King et al., 2006 Antaramian, 2015), and others in the long term, such as dysfunctional relationship ( Kerr and Capaldi, 2011), recurrent mental health problems, university dropout, lower rates of employment, and reduced personal income ( Fergusson et al., 2007). Some researchers refer to these trends as an emerging “mental health crisis” in higher education ( Kadison and DiGeronimo, 2004 Evans et al., 2018). First, although university students report levels of mental health similar to their non-university counterparts ( Blanco et al., 2008), recent studies suggest an increase and severity of mental problems and help-seeking behaviors in university students around the world in the last decade ( Wong et al., 2006 Hunt and Eisenberg, 2010 Verger et al., 2010 Auerbach et al., 2018 Lipson et al., 2019). This is likely due to three interrelated challenges. The interest in mental health and well-being in university students has grown exponentially in the last decades.
Also, the probabilities of experiencing common psychological problems, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, increase throughout adolescence and reach a peak in early adulthood around age 25 ( Kessler et al., 2007) which makes university students a particularly vulnerable population. Indeed, there is evidence that a strain on mental health is placed on students once they start at the university, and although it decreases throughout their studies ( Macaskill, 2013 Mey and Yin, 2015), it does not return to pre-university levels ( Cooke et al., 2006 Bewick et al., 2010). These challenges can affect the mental health and well-being of higher education students. In addition, many students must, often for the first time, leave their homes and distance themselves from their support networks ( Cleary et al., 2011). Through this transition, students face new challenges, such as making independent decisions about their lives and studies, adjusting to the academic demands of an ill-structured learning environment, and interacting with a diverse range of new people. The entrance to the university marks a period of transition for young people. The findings are discussed, and the implications for the future development of the field are highlighted. Key findings of the study are that research on mental health and well-being in university students: (a) has experienced a steady growth over the last decades, especially since 2010 (b) is disseminated in a wide range of journals, mainly in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and education research (c) is published by scholars with diverse geographical background, although more than half of the publications are produced in the United States (d) lies on a fragmented research community composed by multiple research groups with little interactions between them (e) is relatively interdisciplinary and emerges from the convergence of research conducted in the behavioral and biomedical sciences (f) tends to emphasize pathogenic approaches to mental health (i.e., mental illness) and (g) has mainly addressed seven research topics over the last 45 years: positive mental health, mental disorders, substance abuse, counseling, stigma, stress, and mental health measurement. More specifically, this study uses bibliometric procedures to describe and visually represent the available literature on mental health and well-being in university students in terms of the growth trajectory, productivity, social structure, intellectual structure, and conceptual structure of the field over 45 years. The purpose of this study is to map the literature on mental health and well-being of university students using metadata extracted from 5,561 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database for the period 1975–2020. 3Psychological Counseling Center, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.2Nazarbayev University School of Medicine, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.1Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.Daniel Hernández-Torrano 1*, Laura Ibrayeva 1, Jason Sparks 1, Natalya Lim 2, Alessandra Clementi 2, Ainur Almukhambetova 1, Yerden Nurtayev 3 and Ainur Muratkyzy 1