Alex Arceo 1

Alex Arceo

Professor Ryan

English 101, 11:00 AM

11/10/2019

Why Mental Health Affect Students Education

The claim that some people have is that mental health has no effect on what students are

able to learn. Even though there have been many studies going over why the mental health of the

student affects their education and why you should care about. The claim that mental health

plays no role on the students education is once based off assumptions. There are many reasons to

care for the mental health of students and how they affect the student. My own view on this is

just that mental health affects many students greatly and to varying degrees.

To begin with, a study done by Barnes & Noble College Insights conducted a survey of

762 college students from two-year and four-year colleges and 1,708 parents of current college

students. As said in the article, “Two New Studies Probe College Students’ Mental Health” ,

“Barnes & Noble bookstores are located on over 700 campuses and employ nearly 15,000

student workers during peak times”, meaning that the data that was collected did not reflect only

the one area of the country. When the students were surveyed it was found that 76% of all the

students said that they had prior experience with mental health and that it affected them. With

many of the problems being that of stress, anxiety and depression. These were all caused by the

stressful environment that college was known for. Within that 76% of students that reported

mental health issues the majority being, “89 percent report high levels of stress, 86 percent cite

anxiety and 66 percent describe depression,”(Lois Effman). The students that looked for help
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professionally were less than a quarter, 21%. and another 21% admitted they used medications to

help them. While another, “17% say they engage in social drinking”, (Lois Effman). The

majority of the students going through this experience used other means to help reduce the

problems they were going through, never attempted to actually solve it through seeking help

professionally.

Furthermore, this issue of a students mental health is usually thought to only occur in

young adults, but it can also occur in children as can be seen in the article “Mental Health In

Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students”, created by Meg Anderon and Kavitha

Cardoza. In this article it speaks of a student named Katie, who at the age of 8 she had to transfer

to a new school district in the middle of the school year. This sudden change of environment was

too much of a burden for her and it started causing problems that affected her severely and are

still affecting her today. “She’s been diagnosed with bulimia and depression,” (Anderson and

Cardoza). When explaining what was going on in her head she said it felt as if no-one would care

to help her or even pay enough attention to he to help her, (Anderson and Cardoza). Before she

had been forced to transfer she was an honor roll student, but as the months progressed she had

found that with started failing, while also gaining weight. Katie had been bullied for being

overweight and it all this culminated to her starting to cut herself. This continued through

highschool. At one point she had even, “told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted

into the hospital,”(Anderson and Cardoza). All this happened because the school system that she

had grown up in was not prepared to handle or even identify whether or not a student was having

mental problems. Even I can relate to what Katie was going through somewhat. When I was in Jr

High I had problems with my self-esteem and controlling my weight. The feeling that people
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were constantly judging me because of my weight and my appearance caused me to feel

excluded from activities. Because of this I had also been losing motivation to do schoolwork and

it was causing my grades to fall. This caused me to start developing ideas of self-harm and for a

short period of time had considered doing it. There was no real outlet at the school that allowed

me to speak to other people about it. “During all this time, she says, not a single principal or

teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: ‘What's wrong?’” (Anderson and

Cardoza). The people that are supposed to be able to help identify these problems and help solve

them never actually did anything for both Katie and me. The only reason I came out of this state

temporarily was because I found a way to solve my problem of low self-esteem which was

through exercise. If I had never found this outlet I would have been stuck in that state and would

have most likely continued with those ideas of self harm and actually execute them. That feeling

of being left out still flows strongly within me sometimes to this day.

Even with all this information laid out to the reader there will still be some people out

there that will say, “Why should we care what happens to them?”. Well in many cases of

students dealing with depression, anxiety or stress, the student will often find it hard to excel

academically for many reasons. For example, the student will not be able to concentrate easily on

a lecture or document because of the stress of multiple assignments that are due. For those that

are dealing with depression or something similar, they find it hard to maintain enough energy to

spend a full day on campus (How does mental illness affect my school performance?). This

causes many problems for the campus. If the students find that they have no way to deal with

their mental problems through the college they may just end up dropping out. They drop out

because they are not able to easily focus on their work and do poorly on it. This can mean losses
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in tuition and fees. This also causes many problems for the community later on because if the

student is to drop out it means they are unable to complete their degrees. Which means there are

going to be less people that are able to do a specific kind of job for the community

(Consequences of Student Mental Health Issues).

In conclusion, you should be worrying about the mental health of students for many

reasons. The loss of important job skills and the students well-being being the two major factors

for the reasons you should care. Meanwhile people still believe that the mental health of students

do not affect students and their education. Just imagine if, for example, it was your friend/child

that was going through this. Would you tell them to just fight through it and not worry about it or

would you try to help them?

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Citations

“Consequences of Student Mental Health Issues”, Suicide Prevention Resource Center,

n.d.,​https://www.sprc.org/colleges-universities/%20consequences

“How does mental illness affect my school performance?” Boston University Center for

Psychiatric Rehabilitation, n.d.

,​https://cpr.bu.edu/resources/reasonable-accommodations/jobschool/how-does-mental-illness-aff

ect-my-school-performance/

Cardoza and Anderson, Kavitha and Meg. “Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis

Affecting Millions Of Students”, nprED, August 31, 2016,

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/31/464727159/mental-health-in-schools-a-hidden-crisis

-affecting-millions-of-students

Elfman, Lois. “Two New Studies Probe College Students’ Mental Health” Diverse Issues

In Education, August 13, 2019, ​https://diverseeducation.com/article/152294/​.