In response to soaring levels of anxiety, colleges are permitting students to have emotional support animals, which can range from a 95-pound pig at Washington State University to a hedgehog at Yale. Campuses are also setting up meditation rooms for students who need peace to relieve stress and ball pits for those who need play.
Cynics decry this mental health outreach, scoffing that young people are mollycoddled. Their derision overlooks the reality many students endure — crushing school debt, rising living costs, unrelenting academic pressure and fractured families. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans 15-24 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As a University of Georgia professor and advisor to multiple student groups, John A. Knox says the downward trend of student mental health is one of biggest changes from his time as an undergraduate.
“As a professor, I now spend more time concerned about my students’ mental and emotional well-being than I think my professors did in the 1980s, and more than I expected to when I entered the professoriate in 1998, and more than I did when I was first at UGA in the early 2000s,” he said.
(Knox was named Georgia Professor of the year in 2014 by the the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The U.S. Professors of the Year program recognizes the most outstanding undergraduate instructors in the country—those who excel in teaching and positively influence the lives and careers of students.)
Young people today report higher levels of unhappiness than previous generations. In a new survey of more than 20,000 Americans released last week by Cigna, they say they are also lonelier. Adults ages 18-22 had higher loneliness scores than retirees on the survey.
An annual survey of first-year college students dating back 52 years has charted upswings in depression over recent years. Administered by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, a record-high 11.9 percent of the 137,456 respondents to the 2016 Freshman Survey reported “frequently” feeling depressed in the past year; more than one-third reported they often felt anxious.
The big question is why.
“There is likely no one explanation, just as there is often no one explanation for, say, the decline of an ecosystem,” said Knox, suggesting several possible causes — online bullying, a coarsening of our culture that tolerates attacks and shaming, and an erosion of physical activity, including school recess.
“I do think the culture of fear that has been pretty much non-stop in the United States since 9/11/2001, for reasons both real and also invented, has played a bigger part than might be realized at times,” Knox said.
I put the question to educators and parents and received dozens of responses about why students feel stressed and alone. Here are a few:
— College-age Americans are lonely because they grew up around social media. Whether they participated in it or not during their more formative years, it has had a pervasive impact on society and on how people interact with each other. It’s this whole idea that everyone has a cooler, better life than me, based on what they see on social media. People get those thoughts in their heads, and it can be very isolating.
— It stems from parents doing so much for kids that they can’t do anything alone and thus feel lonely. Also I see so many parents who do everything with their kids and see them as friends, not as their children. If the kid goes everywhere with parents, they can’t break that tie and thus feel so alone without them.
— I grew up in a close family and with close extended family nearby and I was incredibly lonely early on when I went away to college. (Early 90s so we can’t blame social media). I think young people are learning to be themselves and be alone. I went from a small high school to a very large university. It’s a big adjustment.
— They have watched companies lay off parents and have every reason to not feel financially secure. Even if you have it today, it may be taken away from you tomorrow. You can attend college, but you won't be guaranteed a job. Maybe they are not spoiled snowflakes; maybe they are adrift in the confusing state of everything that even the adults can't figure out. Increased indicators of loneliness and suicide rates among our teens and young adults should terrify us, and the dismal access to mental healthcare compounds the problem.
About the Author
