Meaningful Living to Promote Complete Mental Health Among University Students in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Maintaining positive mental health can be challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic which undoubtedly caused devastating consequences on people’s lives. There is need to determine factors contributing to mental health of people during the pandemic. The current study aims to examine the effect of meaning in life on complete mental health, which represents the presence of positive functioning and the absence of psychopathological symptoms. The participants of the study included 392 (70.9% female) undergraduate students, ranging in age from 18 to 43 years (M = 20.67 years, SD = 3.66) and they have predominantly been imposed stay-at-home orders for coronavirus right after announcement of COVID-19 restrictions in Turkey. Latent variable path analyses demonstrated significant paths from meaning in life to all components of psychological distress, positive mental health, and subjective well-being. Multi-group analysis showed significant gender differences across the study variables. These findings corroborate the critical role of meaning in life in promoting complete mental health and shed further light on why people high in meaning in life tend to have better mental health than those low in meaning in life within the context of COVID-19.