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  Background & objectives: Students are one of the vulnerable parts of the community. They mostly will be future managers or planners. Given the importance of nursing students' mental health, this study was planned to determine the mental health status and its relations with demographic factors among nursing students in Ahvaz.

  Methods : In this descriptive study, a consensus sampling method was used to choose 149 students of the school of Nursing and Midwifery during 2013-2014. Data were gathered by a demographic form and the Goldberg’s General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), and was analyzed using descriptive statistics, ANOVA and t-test in SPSS v.19. Statistical tests were considered significant at p-value less than .05.

  Results: Based on the GHQ scores, 59.7% of students were healthy, 34.2% were susceptible and the rest of them, 6.1% fell under the poor mental health. There were significant association between gender, interest in the field of study, accommodation status and parents' level of education with mental health (p<0.05).

  Conclusions: According to the results, the large numbers of nursing students are susceptible to mental health problems. Therefore, careful planning is essential in order to identify the factors affecting mental health and consequently improvement of mental health in nursing students.