Introduction: The rapid socio-cultural changes, i.e. changing the structure of the family and human lifestyle can change the humans with various issues. The deals with these changes require psycho-social abilities. In the present paper it had been reviewed the effect of educating life skills on the mental health of students of Ilam University of medical sciences.

Methods: This is a quasi-experimental research using post and pre tests. In this study, 61 freshmen were selected through stratified random sampling method in 2013. From this population, 34 ones were in the experimental group and 27 in the control group. For data collection, the general health questionnaire of Goldberg was used. The data were analyzed using SPSS20 software. The univariate analysis of covariance and multivariate analysis of covariance and paired T-test were analyzed.

Results: The results showed that based on univariate analysis there was a significant correlation between the experimental and control groups in the scales of physical  symptoms (p = 0.002), social dysfunction symptoms (p = 0.001) and depression symptoms  (p = 0.048), but there was not a significant relationship in the scale of anxiety symptoms (p = 0.174). Multivariate analysis of covariance showed that there are significance deference between the subscales of mental health in experimental and control groups (P=.002). According to the analysis of paired t-test in the experimental group, life skill decreased the mean of scores in posttest compared to the pretest in the scales of the physical (p=0.001), anxiety (p=0.006), social dysfunction (0.017) and depression (p=0.001).

Conclusion: Life skills training had an effect on reducing the impact of students' mental health scores. Training of these kinds of skills causes the progress among the freshmen.