MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION ON REDUCING STIGMA AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ SEEKING COUNSELLING IN NASARAWA STATE, NIGERIA

The study was designed to assess mental health education on reducing stigma of university students towards seeking counselling in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study and two hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study employed descriptive survey research design. A total of 1520 students of Nasarawa State University serve as target population comprised Faculties of Law, Education, Social Sciences, Arts, Administration, Environmental and Natural and Applied Science. The simple random sampling technique of balloting without replacement was used to select 150 second year students as 10% of the population based on Krejcie Morgan (1970). An adapted instrument, assessing mental health towards seeking counselling (AMITSE) was used to solicit information from the respondents. The instruments were validated and logical validity indices were 0.83 and 0.79 with internal consistency reliability of 0.87 and 0.89. Chi-square statistic was used for the analysis. The results showed that mental health education had significant stigma reduction among students seeking counseling, implication of the findings include providing support for mental health programmes directly targeting stigma towards seeking counseling. Recommendations centered on the need for counselors to teach cognitive behavioural strategies to university students to help them to know how to manage stigma and discrimination.