There’s a lot of talk about mental health on campus these days – Sunday’s Globe feature, a Toronto Star piece from last week, and the September cover story in Maclean’s, are but three recent examples. Part of what seems to be driving the increased concern is that the kids affected by this crisis aren’t necessarily the ones on the margin, but are often amongst those considered to be “high-achievers.”
Without casting doubt on the seriousness of the issue – and it is a serious issue – there’s a part of this story which I find quite puzzling: Why is this suddenly an issue, now? What’s changed?
I don’t find any of the commonly-advanced explanations particularly convincing. The main one is that, “youth are just under so much pressure these days”, usually followed by references to high tuition fees, student debt, and/or weak graduate job prospects. But the facts don’t bear-out the claim: Net tuition is stable (or declining) in much of Canada, student debt in real dollars has barely changed in a decade, and student job prospects were appreciably worse in the early-to-mid-90s, without triggering any similar rise in mental health issues.
Instead, I see two factors more at work here.
First is the tendency to over-medicalize daily life. Melonie Fullick, for example, wrote a few months back about mental health issues in graduate school. She does an excellent job of outlining the difficulties and frustrations accompanying graduate studies, and the ways in which institutional academic policies accentuate those frustrations. But, in fact, much of what she describes can more properly be characterized as “angst,” rather than mental health issues, and we should be careful about conflating the two.
Second, Fullick is undoubtedly on to something in pinpointing the roots of anxiety in failure (either real or anticipated). But it’s not as though failure has spiked lately (student job prospects, on the whole, remain better than they were for most of the 90s). So if this “epidemic” is real, then it must mean that it’s fear of failure which is rising, independent of any actual change in students’ fortunes.
I can’t prove this, obviously, but I get the sense that as a society we’ve spent too much effort raising kids’ self-esteem and, in the process, removed any sense of adversity (or the importance of overcoming adversity) from their lives. As Paul Tough has written about, both for The New York Times Magazine, and in his latest book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character,
So, although parents might be loath to hear it, we need to consider a very different possibility: that the spike in rates of reported mental stress might have more to do with incoming students simply being a lot more fragile, and less prepared, than were their predecessors.
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Alex, I think you are on to something. Fear of failing is something that lives in the student experience…for top students as well as those who are working hard to achieve more average grades. This plays out even more so for those who have disabilities, are first generaton or are in Canada as international students. Expectations are high and the pressures to succeed are real. While this may not be new to us in higher education, what is new is that students who experience the fear of failure often do not come from families with a history of college or university attendance; thus, these students are not as equipped as those who have come before them. Further, with so much on the line (university or college credentials are required for so many careers), fear of failure is increasingly affecting all of our students.
You should read Margaret Wente’s column today. It’s very good.