ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2026
Perceived stigma, emotional resilience, and depressive/anxiety symptoms across school stages: a cross-sectional study.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Adolescent psychological distress rises sharply. Stigma may inflict harms that exceed the disorders themselves; stress and emotional resilience is pivotal for mental health. Yet how perceived stigma, stress, resilience, and symptoms interact across school stages remains underexplored. We therefore examined stage-specific prevalence and interrelations of perceived stigma, perceived stress, emotional resilience, depression, and anxiety. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, school-based online survey from November 2024 to February 2025 among students in Chongqing, Sichuan, and Hubei. All students in participating schools were invited without sex or age restrictions. The scales included the Perceived Devaluation and Discrimination (PDD), the Stress Numerical Rating Scale-11 (SNRS-11), the Adolescents' Emotional Resilience Questionnaire (AERQ), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7(GAD-7). Analyses comprised descriptive statistics (for stigma, stress, resilience, and mental-health), Pearson and partial correlations (age/sex-adjusted), and mediation modeling. Results: A total of 86,513 students were included. Clear stage gradients emerged: junior high showed the highest prevalence of PHQ-9/GAD-7 ≥10 and greater stigma and stress, whereas university showed the lowest levels; girls, especially in junior high, bore the greatest burden. In mediation models, stigma was associated with lower resilience, and lower resilience was linked to higher depressive and anxiety symptoms; indirect pathways were significant for both outcomes. The direct effect of stigma was negative overall, with stage-dependent variations: positive in junior/senior high and negative in university, suggesting heterogeneous effects by school stage. Conclusion: Findings highlight emotional resilience as a principal pathway linking stigma to depressive and anxiety symptoms, with stronger mediation at later school stages. This supports a dual-track approach to school mental health: anti-stigma and help-seeking initiatives alongside resilience-enhancement embedded in curricula and school climate. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, reliance on self-report, potential selection/nonresponse bias from voluntary online participation, and under-representation of out-of-school youth. Prospective longitudinal or intervention studies with causal-mediation frameworks and broader sampling are warranted to clarify mechanisms across developmental stages.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.