Medical students are vulnerable to depression and anxiety due to the nature of their academic life. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms among medical students and the association between religious coping, religiosity and socio-demographic factors with anxiety and depressive symptoms. A cross sectional design was used for this study. Scales used were the Malay version of the Duke Religious Index (DUREL-M), the Malay version of the Brief Religious Coping Scale (Brief RCOPE) and the Malay version Hospital and Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS-M). 622 students participated in this study. They scored moderately on the organized (mean: 3.51) and non-organized religious (mean: 3.85) subscales of the DUREL, but had high intrinsic religiosity (mean: 12.18). The prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms were 4.7% and 17.4% respectively, which is lower than local as well as international data. Islam, negative religious coping and the presence of depressive symptoms were significantly associated with anxiety symptoms. Only the presence of anxiety symptoms was significantly associated with depressive symptoms. Negative religious coping, rather than positive religious coping, has significant association with depressive and anxiety symptoms. Redirecting focus towards negative religious coping is imperative to boost mental health outcomes among medical students.

Background: Relapse prevention strategies are important as part of optimal patient care. As such, maintenance electroconvulsive therapy (mECT) is an important treatment modality to keep patients in remission longer. However, the practice of mECT in Malaysia, specifically and Asia generally, is still scarce. Aims: Our study aimed to explore the characteristics of patients receiving maintenance ECT (mECT) and further investigate whether this treatment modality reduces re-admission days in patients with severe mental illness. Methods: A retrospective chart review study design was employed. The medical records of 22 patients followed up at University Malaya Medical Centre, Malaysia were analysed with regards to the outcome measures, which was days of re-admission post mECT, Potential confounders were controlled for via stratification analysis. Results: There was a significant reduction in re-admission days post mECT (p<0.001, r:0.85) across all the variables analysed. The variable with the biggest effect size were patients younger than 60 years old (p:0.01, r:0.70), followed by medication with polypharmacy (p:0.002, r: 0.65). The magnitude of reduction in re-admissions was greater in the schizophrenia spectrum group compared to the affective disorders group (r: 0.64 vs. 0.57). Conclusion: Our study provides data regarding the efficacy of mECT in significantly reducing days of re-admission in patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia spectrum illness and affective disorders. As widespread usage of mECT is still lacking in Asia, our results is encouraging for more practitioners to prescribe mECT for their patients in order to reduce rates of hospital re-admission.