New Report Identifies Common Mental Health Issues Among Students, Ways They Cope
College students say they feel stressed 80% of the time. They also experience feelings of anxiousness and being overwhelmed.
AUSTIN, Texas — A new report was released this week using research from the largest mental health survey of its kind. Nearly 20,000 college students were surveyed to learn more about their mental health.
The survey was done over the last two years by Austin-based nonprofit Hi, How Are You Project. The College Student Mental Wellness Advocacy Coalition helped put the report together.
In the survey, students were asked to rate their current lives on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst possible life and 10 representing the best possible life. Depending on the number they chose, most students fell into one of these categories:
Of the students surveyed, 39% fell into the "thriving" category, 13% were classified as "maintaining" and 3% fell into the "struggling" category.
The survey also asked students which emotions they usually feel. Students responded that 80% of the time, they feel stressed.
"They are experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety and feeling overwhelmed," said Dr. Kate Lowery with the College Student Mental Wellness Advocacy Coalition. "So, we've been able to look at the data and really learn about the behaviors and environments and things that students do to help help them de-stress."
There are a couple of things college students turn to in an effort to alleviate stress.
"The No. 1 activity they turn to in times of stress or to really help focus on mental well-being is they turn to music," Lowery said. "And then socializing is the second most popular thing that they do. So, we're happy to see that that is happening on campuses."
Students also said they watch TV, take a walk, get a good night's sleep and exercise to alleviate stress. While all these things help, music still remains the top thing students turn to in a time of stress.
"It can have a calming effect or kind of help them kind of disconnect from the daily stressors," Lowery said. "Go to a place that's positive and really tapping into the joy that music brings, whether it's listening to the lyrics or just disconnecting."
Knowing this, researchers suggest that creating social events around music could be a great way to promote social interactions among college students and help them achieve good mental health.
Researchers hope student housing providers and universities use the data gathered from the survey to support students' needs.
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Relieving Stress And Supporting Mental Health
Students with intellectual disabilities (ID) face unique challenges during the transition to independent living on a college campus. Issues of time management, navigating relationships and dealing with stigma are just some of the challenges they must confront.
Brittany Powers first realized gaps in the system working in the health and wellness unit for individuals with disabilities across the lifespan at the University of Delaware’s Center for Disabilities Studies on campus. These gaps came to the forefront as the population of students with ID continues to rise across college campuses.
“While they’re developing new certificate programs and independent living skills programs for students with intellectual disabilities to get the college experience and establish some career readiness, most colleges and universities aren’t quite equipped to support the mental health needs of those students,” Powers said.
The lack of support in place for these students inspired Powers, a fourth-year health behavior science and promotion doctoral candidate in the Department of Behavioral Health and Nutrition in the College of Health Sciences, to work to ease that transition and empower students with ID.
“I wanted to create a program that was less therapy-based, but more in the style of a group workshop focused on time management and stress in hopes the program can be replicated in the future, putting supports in place to meet the unique needs of students with ID,” Powers said.
Powers focused her undergraduate studies on psychology at Providence College, obtained her master’s degree in public health from New York Medical College and participated in a graduate fellowship in maternal and child health and disabilities through the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities (LEND) program at the Westchester Institute for Human Development. For the past three years, she’s been involved in the National Research Consortium on Mental Health in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
“My Ph.D. Studies have allowed me to marry together all my different passions around supporting mental health needs, working with people with disabilities and supporting their unique needs and their family’s needs,” Powers said.
As part of her dissertation, Powers conducted on-campus interviews with students and staff to gain a better understanding of the unique stressors and anxieties that students with ID face and to identify coping strategies already in use. Her interviews reinforced that students with ID face challenges around socialization and relationships.
“They must navigate changing relationships with parents or guardians who they were dependent on,” Powers said. “They also face challenges with stigmatization and making new friends.”
Students with ID identified a variety of healthy coping mechanisms from listening to music and watching TV to taking naps and exercising. But she also learned:
“The transition brings up issues around time management, involving the level of coursework and ensuring there’s time to plan for meals and rest. They also face challenges with how downtime is spent,” Powers said. “In some cases, when they’re stressed, students with ID might shut down and withdraw, missing classes and assignments; they’ve also stopped talking to their mentors.”
This feedback informed Powers’ pilot intervention, the MIND/MOVE Yourself Program, that was tested during the fall semester among students with ID at UD, Villanova University and East Stroudsburg University. Students with ID, enrolled in UD’s Career and Life Studies Certificate (CLSC) Program, met twice weekly with Powers in a group setting in Warner Hall over the course of six weeks.
Each week, students in the group focused on a different topic from understanding stress and self-reflection to time management and scheduling healthy habits, identity awareness and getting connected to campus resources.
“When you’re talking about what causes stress and how you deal with it, it can be a sensitive topic,” Powers said. “The students did a wonderful job engaging with each other. That spoke to the group setting being the right dynamic for this program.”
Powers opened sessions by asking students to rate their stress levels. From there, she transitioned to mindful breathing exercises and meditation techniques. The final week of the program centered on connecting students to campus resources and setting larger goals for their time at UD.
“We want to make sure you get the most out of your campus experience and understand how important that is for your mental health to ensure you’re connected to other students and each other,” Powers told the group.
The program typically consists of 30 minutes of discussion and 30 minutes of yoga practice but has some flexibility.
“Because such in-depth discussions were happening within the UD group, we only did 15 minutes of yoga,” Powers said. “I received feedback from students that these discussions and time to share their experiences were really important.”
Powers, who’s also a certified yoga instructor, hopes the program she’s developed gives students with ID more tools to manage their stress.
“They’re getting a sampling of different techniques and strategies that they can use,” Powers said. “Yoga is not for everyone, but hopefully, they’ll enjoy learning about breathing and relaxation as part of the practice. I hope they learned something new, found the program useful or thought the group setting was an opportunity to share, connect and build social companionship that can relieve stress.”
Zach Simpler, a fourth year CLSC student, who participated in the MIND/MOVE Yourself Program, hasn’t had too much trouble finding his home on UD’s campus. He works on equipment needs for the Blue Hens football team.
“It’s basically my third home because all the players and coaches know,” Simpler said. “Ever since my first day on the job with the football team, I felt as if I wasn’t being judged and I was accepted into the UD Blue Hens football family.”
He found the yoga portion of the program most helpful. He loved it so much he built a yoga studio inside his dorm in Caesar Rodney, where he’s floor captain and organizes pizza and movie nights to bring students together.
“Yoga brings me into a different mentality and lets me go to a part of myself that I haven’t charted or explored before,” Simpler said. “When I do yoga, I feel out-of-this-world amazing … it puts me in that mindset of peace.”
He also learned enhanced coping mechanisms.
“When I feel stressed, I focus on breathing techniques or listen to my records. I also use a planner to schedule my day hour-by-hour,” Simpler said.
Post-graduation, Powers said she would love to test the MIND/MOVE Yourself Program on more college campuses, evaluate its effectiveness, refine the program and ultimately, implement the curriculum at other colleges and universities.
“Brittany’s research will show not just if the MIND/MOVE Yourself Program reduces stress and anxiety in college students with ID, but her assessments of autonomic function and daily perceived stress will suggest how the program works as well,” said Freda Patterson, associate professor of behavioral health and nutrition. “Her results are expected to directly inform and improve stress prevention and management programs for college students with ID. We’re thrilled by the positive impact Brittany is having on her field.”
Simpler said he would recommend the MIND/MOVE Yourself Program to any student.
“A person would be crazy if they turned down the opportunity because it’s worth it,” he said.
But his participation in the program centered around making a difference for fellow students with ID.
“I always wanted to feel like I was a part of something that helps change the world to make individuals with disabilities feel more accepted on campus,” Simpler said. “Participating in this program made me feel like I’m making a positive impact on the student body.”
Are More People Depressed & Anxious, Or Are We Just Getting Better At Talking About Mental Health?
This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent in by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Over the last decade, and especially since 2020, the knowledge that more and more people are struggling with mental health conditions has almost become rote, along with a dizzying list of interacting factors that contribute to this reality.
When a 75-year-old reader sent us the question, “Why does mental illness seem to be on the rise?” I considered laying out in this newsletter the many reasons why a growing number of people are anxious and depressed.
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The 24/7 news cycle is harming our mental health. The 40+-hour workweek and grind culture are harming our mental health. Social media’s algorithms, designed to keep us angry, distracted and siloed, are harming our mental health, and so, too, are social isolation, income inequality, climate change, racism, sexism, sizeism, homophobia and transphobia. And on and on.
But that type of reporting (while vital) is everywhere right now, saturating TV news and social media timelines. So I decided to diverge from the causes of these conditions and look into how we actually know mental health issues are on the rise, and how such data are shaped by our increasing awareness of mental health issues.
So how is it tracked?Before the 1970s, mental health conditions were tracked solely through hospital reporting data. But that method revealed an incomplete picture, as the only people being accounted for were largely those being treated in the throes of a crisis, explained Bernice A. Pescosolido, a sociology professor at Indiana University whose research focuses on how social networks and culture provide insights into health.
Then, in 1977, President Carter’s mental health commission released a report that emphasized the importance of using epidemiological research to frame physical health and mental health policies. Born from this call to action was the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) program, which aimed to collect data on the prevalence of mental illness in the U.S. And determine the need for services to treat those disorders. It was one of the largest such investigations ever conducted.
“Those researchers were the first to go into the population and develop questionnaires that were really very good at estimating the rate of depression and anxiety in the population, not just those who get to the hospital or doctor,” Pescosolido told me.
Since then, surveys that seek to understand rates of mental illness in the U.S. Population have continued to be tweaked and refined. Two large, ongoing and yearly surveys conducted by the federal government are the Centers for Disease Control’s National Health Interview Survey — for which 88,000 people nationally are randomly selected to participate, and which includes short questions about anxiety and depression symptoms — and the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The latter has a sample size of about 67,000 and collects information on substance use and mental health issues among Americans ages 12 and older.
What these surveys and others have told us is that symptoms of anxiety and depression doubled during the pandemic. But mental health issues were already on the rise in the United States, with emergency room visits related to depression, anxiety and similar conditions up 28% between 2011 and 2015.
These surveys aren’t taken in a vacuum, though. “Willingness to talk about this stuff has changed dramatically,” said Ronald Kessler, a Harvard University sociologist whose research focuses on the social determinants of mental health conditions from an epidemiological perspective.
“In the past 15 years, we have famous people going on evening talk shows, talking about their mental health struggles and suicide attempts,” he said. That would’ve been almost unfathomable in the not-so-distant past (when suicide attempts were quasi-illegal).
And public opinion has changed dramatically over time, too. Much like society changed its views on cancer, which used to be referred to only in whispers as “the big C,” more people are growing willing to talk about their mental health diagnoses. According to a 2019 poll, 87% of American adults agreed that having a mental health disorder is nothing to be ashamed of, and 86% said they believe that people with mental health disorders can get better. (It should be noted, though, that there’s a difference between society embracing anxiety and depression, versus how we view people diagnosed with mental illnesses with greater stigma attached to them, such as personality disorders and schizophrenia.)
It’s likely that someone who may have been hesitant to report their depression symptoms to a national survey worker in 2005 is willing to do so now.
“This is why numbers aren’t a pure indicator of whether there are more mental health problems in society,” Pescosolido said.
So how much, exactly, is the shifting narrative around mental health shaping the reporting data?
“We know that reports of anxiety and depression are going up, and we suspect that some part of that is real, and some part of it is due to greater awareness and willingness to talk,” Kessler said. “The question is, how would we ever really in a rigorous way be able to figure that out? We can’t.”
“The other piece of it is — who cares,” he went on. “We know it’s a big problem right now. The pandemic helped us realize that a very high prevalence of mental disorders has been there all along, and that many people have been suffering in silence.”
The real crisis, Kessler said, is the number of people who aren’t getting adequate care, if any at all. “We know how to treat people,” he said, “but the great majority who need it aren’t getting help.”
Fewer than half of Americans with an identified mental health condition were treated in 2020, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness — and that doesn’t even account for the quality of care. The average delay between onset of disorder symptoms and treatment is 11 years.
A silver liningTLDR; experts believe that both prevalence and awareness of mental health conditions are on the rise. And there is, I think, a silver lining to all of this. Because the statistics are so grim and people are finally talking about mental health, there’s heightened pressure on state and federal governments to provide access to care, and hopefully to fund related research. People are realizing that job-related stress is affecting their mental health and are quiet-quitting or literally quitting, so an increasing number of employers are offering mental health benefits to retain workers.
I hear far more people in my own life talking about their anxiety and depression than I did 10 years ago. It’s difficult to know that so many of my family members and friends are struggling, but it gives me some hope that we’re finally able to talk about it openly, without the burden of shame. I’m wishing that for all of you, too.
Until next week,
Laura
If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email GroupTherapy@latimes.Com gets right to our team. As always, find us on Instagram at @latimesforyourmind, where we’ll continue this conversation.
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More perspectives on today’s topic & other resourcesArticle after article shows us that America’s teenagers aren’t doing well, without putting their finger on what is wrong beyond issues of individual “mental illness” and the usual causes trotted out — social media, video games, the weakening of the family unit, writes clinical psychologist Jamieson Webster. But what are the teenagers telling us is wrong? “We seem to have forgotten that adolescents are lightning rods for the zeitgeist,” Webster said. “They live at the fault lines of a culture, exposing our weak spots, showing the available array of solutions and insolubilities. They are holding up a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly.”
Is the U.S. Experiencing a mental health pandemic? In this piece by psychiatrist Ronald Pies, he argues that while millions of people are suffering emotionally because of COVID-19, CDC surveys cannot tell us whether more people are actually meeting the threshold of a mood or anxiety disorder, but instead just screen for symptoms. “The difference between symptoms and disorder is not merely semantic,” he writes. “A formal, clinical diagnosis of a mental disorder has wholly different implications — medical, legal, and psychological — than those associated with, say, a normal or adaptive response to the stress and strain of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
These two major shifts have sparked a mental health crisis among LGBTQ+ kids and teens in California: the ripple effects of pandemic isolation along with a hostile political climate that is targeting queer and transgender youth. One survey found that during the 2021-22 school year, nearly 80% of bisexual, gay and lesbian middle schoolers reported depression, stress and anxiety as an obstacle to learning, double the rate of straight students.
Other interesting stuffThe mental health field is increasingly looking to chatbots to relieve escalating pressure on a limited pool of licensed therapists. But it’s entering uncharted ethical territory as it confronts questions about how closely AI should be involved in such deeply sensitive support, according to this piece from STAT news.
Disability and civil rights advocates filed a lawsuit last week asking the California Supreme Court to block the rollout of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s far-reaching new plan to address severe mental illness by compelling treatment for thousands of people. Advocates urged the state’s high court to strike down as unconstitutional the program known as CARE Court (for Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment). The groups argue that the new court system will violate due process and equal protection rights under the state Constitution, while “needlessly burdening fundamental rights to privacy, autonomy and liberty.”
How can we support Asian American seniors who’ve been affected by the recent mass shootings? The victims of the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings were mainly Asian American first-generation immigrants in their 50s, 60s and 70s. And their healing, experts say, will be helped by younger generations checking in on their elders — the ones who were directly affected as well as the ones feeling secondary trauma from seeing violence inflicted on people who look like them, write my colleagues Karen Garcia and Ada Tseng.
Group Therapy is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. We encourage you to seek the advice of a mental health professional or other qualified health provider with any questions or concerns you may have about your mental health.
