Mental Health: What Do Students Think About It?
By Sabrina PhamJune 1, 2023
According to the CDC, “two-thirds of people with diagnosable mental disorders do not seek treatment. Treatment is individualized and may include counseling, psychotherapy, medication therapy, rehabilitation, and attention to other mental and psychosocial problems.”
This fact is generally the most known, though the more hidden problem regarding mental health isn’t as talked about, which is how some people in different generations perceive mental health in general. Whether they be students, teachers, adults, mental health issues are more or less commonly known depending on the generation that the person was raised in. For Gen Z, the topic of mental health and things like stress, depression, anxiety are more known and experienced, especially for students.
The hot topic that causes stress on students in particular is school. With the kind of workload that schools give now, like with tech, steps to get into college, it can stress students out. This essentially makes it more common for a high schooler to have or develop a kind of mental disorder (depression, anxiety)
“School related things [cause stress], said Mariam, a 10th grader at E&S. “There’s a question of ‘what do you want to do in the future’ that stresses me out, as well as pressure from people.”
While school is a main source of stress, many students are aware of the stress and its impact on their mental health. “You don’t even know if a person has stress, anxiety, or depression”, Mariam says. “If someone looks like they’re struggling, and if you want to help, try easing into it, you just don’t know what is going through someone’s head.”
Students are aware of mental health being a complex issue that varies from person to person. Schools do their best to counteract the problem and do different things to help their student’s well-being, from wellness surveys to classes on the matter. “I think the wellness surveys don’t do anything. I think they just take it, see it, look over it and throw it out afterwards, that’s what I believe.”
Schools should do better at helping student well-being, it seems that they are doing things like surveys, just to do it and without any meaning. Considering how mental wellness applies personally and not exactly the majority most of the time, there should be something else done. “Wellness days would be nicer if we got to choose what we can do, who we’re with, wellness days would help if we got to choose what we want to do instead.“ Improvements could be made on how the school handles the problem, but because of the kind of generational gap that has that effect in the solutions that they come up with. Students address how mental health is an issue that students themselves should choose how they want/need to go through, whatever they are going through. “For when people come in during class time to try to help students discuss mental health, “I personally didn’t like talking about mental health. I think it was a class that we shouldn’t take altogether, but that people should do individually with the person/teacher of that program.” Mariam says, “I think everyone was pressured to talk about it in that class. Like when she [the teacher] says that everyone has to answer [questions asked] or when she tells the whole class to meditate. Like some people might not want to do that, I don’t want to do that.”
The opinion of wanting to have a choice in the matter, especially since it primarily regards students mental well-being is prominent and isn’t being acknowledged either by adults/teachers. Students who are really struggling, should try reaching out instead of making the majority do something when not everyone is going through the same experience. While there is also that contradicting fact to the idea, “Students also don't really respond if they’re asked “What should we do for our mental health” or “what do you think we should do?” Students either just don’t know, or want to respond, that’s what they think they should do.”
The whole idea of mental health is complicated generally, people have their different wants for what they want to do, it's more of a personal issue that we should figure out ourselves and voluntarily reach out for help. Some people might be struggling, some people might not be, it should be an issue that we handle ourselves instead of one person deciding. No matter how hard we try to understand, and try, mental health is always going to be complex and complicated, it’s definitely going to vary from person to person, it all depends on the person themselves.
What can be done is reaching out if you, or someone you know needs help, even if it’s difficult. Some people may not understand what a person is going through, but there are people out there who can assist, it’s solely up to the person themselves.