Depression and Academic Performance

Depression is a serious mental health issue that affects millions of people around the world. As a student who has struggled with depression, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to focus on school work when you’re heart broken, feeling down. There were times when I found it hard to motivate myself to attend classes, complete assignments, and study for exams, especially when my girlfriend served me a nice breakfast, the slang “breakfast” isn’t new to many Nigerians, especially those on twitter (Breakfast is often described as a sad and emotional moment in a relationship when a man or woman suddenly break up with thier partner), these had negative effect on my academic result so I started getting curious and asking questions.

I was interested in exploring how depression affects academic performance, so I conducted a research project using R. In this Shiny website, I share my findings and personal experience with depression.

Previous research has shown that depression is a serious health concern for the student population (Ibrahim et al 2013), and it has a notable impact on academic performance with depressed students achieving lower grades and being less active in the classroom than their non depressed peers (Wechslr et al 2000). Students who are depressed may have difficulty concentrating, staying motivated, and retaining information. They may also be more likely to miss classes, turn in assignments late, or drop out of school. These negative effects can have long-term consequences for students’ academic and career success.

Depression and its impact on academic performance is a complex and important issue that deserves more attention. Currently there is a limited availability of stand alone websites dedicated to sharing insights in Nigeria, by introducing and leveraging the features and capabilities of Quarto webistes to the development of effective knowledge-sharing platforms and ultimately foster collaboration, accessibility and insights across different domain in Nigeria. I hope to raise awareness of this issue and encourage others to take action and also adopt the use of R Shiny and Quarto to bridge the existing gap in dedicated websites for sharing their scientific research insights with others across the world.

R Shiny and Quarto is highly recommeded as a tool for teaching and learning applied statistics at all tertiary levels. To learn more about Quarto websites visit https://quarto.org/docs/websites.