Freshman year has always been stressful for college kids. New academic expectations, being away from home, new friendships. All difficult things to cope with at any age. But when you throw in spiraling school costs, the looming prospect of joining a notoriously difficult job market and ever escalating expectations and you get a whole generation of dangerously stressed out kids.
A new study from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reports that the emotional health of college freshmen has hit an all-time low. In a survey of more than 200,000 freshmen at 279 colleges and universities only fifty two percent of students rated their emotional health as high or above average. That number is down 3.4 percent from 2009, and dropped a whopping twelve percent from 1985, when sixty four percent of students gave themselves high marks for mental health.
Young women are less likely to feel mentally healthy than young men, the study found. Study author Sylvia Hurtado said in a USA Today article that she thinks this reveals a tendency for men to have better coping skills when it comes to stress, but I tend to agree with Dr. Aaron Ellington, a psychiatrist who works with children and adolescents at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, who told AOL Health that he thinks these results actually indicate quite the opposite.
“Women more easily admit to mental health issues,” he told AOL Health. “I would question the assumption that men are better at ‘working off’ stress. Men and women have different issues, but women are more likely to admit that there are issues in the first place,” he said.
While Ellington believes that more study needs to be done to find out if the drop in emotional health is actually significant. ”The types of problems young people are talking about in my practice are the same,” he says, “though the avenues have changed with the times.”
“For as long as we can remember, students have dealt with bullying, they’ve gotten involved with drugs. The drugs may change, but the behaviors haven’t. In the 1950’s and 1960’s people didn’t believe we had these problems, but the truth is we just didn’t have a name for them. It doesn’t mean that these problems didn’t exist.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that as parents we shouldn’t be looking out for our college kid’s stress levels. Just because they’ve left the nest, doesn’t mean they don’t still need mom and dad to look out for them every once and a while.
