This paper is an attempt to answer the question on the role of the social support in the process of
coping with stress within a group of Polish students in an acculturative stress situation. The research
had two primary goals. The first goal was to show the differences between students of Polish nationality enrolled at foreign universities and students of Polish universities in terms of social support, coping with stress and the depression level. The second goal was to examine relations between those three
variables. In order to select groups with high and low social support the scale of social support by
Kmiecik-Baran has been used. In order to define styles of coping with stress, preferred by the cured
drug addicts, the Polish version of The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations has been used. Both
groups responded to the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), consisting of a self-evaluated scale of
21 items, each with four assertions corresponding to increasing levels of depressive symptoms. The obtained results indicate that students of Polish universities were characterized by a lower level of social
support and they reported higher levels of depression than the control group of Polish students living
abroad. The groups did not differ significantly with respect to the measures of coping styles. According
to the results of the study, the stronger preference for the emotion-oriented coping style, the higher
level of depression, which indicates that this coping style was ineffective in dealing with stressful life
events in both groups of students. In addition, the level of received social support was negatively correlated (r = –0,589) with the task-oriented coping style in a group of students in Poland.