Everyone tells you when you start college that these four years will be the best years of your life; what they don’t tell you is that there are going to be times when college feels like the worst years of your life. No one tells you that there will be days when you fail a test, or you feel so lonely that you call your mom crying uncontrollably. There will be days when you want to drop out and give up. Nobody prepares you for any of this.
You are pressured from the beginning to have so much fun, to get amazing grades, get involved and be the all-around perfect person you always knew you were meant to be. Unfortunately, this is an unattainable reality. It’s impossible to have a 4.0 GPA, a perfect body, tons of friends and no stress at all. We need pragmatism, or else we will all be crippled and crestfallen.
The unrealistic expectations that students have of college most obviously manifest themselves in stress, so understanding the magnitude of this pervading mental health issue is valuable. In 2011 the American College Health Association survey found that around 30 percent of college students are so depressed that they find it hard to function. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that suicide is the third-leading cause of death in young people ages 10-24. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) states, startlingly, that more than 80 percent of college students felt overwhelmed by all they had to do in the past year while 45 percent felt things were hopeless. College students, a seemingly privileged group with allegedly many pleasant things to enjoy, are suffering stress at immensely high rates.
Stress can harmfully manifest itself physically and mentally, so much so that it is crippling. It can have damaging effects on the musculoskeletal system, causing a higher propensity for injury. It can put pressure on your respiratory system, causing panic attacks and asthma. It can create long-term heart problems, affect digestion and also, of course, make the individual more likely to become depressed or suicidal. Just as startling as the negative effects stress has on the body is the fact that, according to NAMI, 75 percent of lifetime cases of mental health conditions begin before the age of 24, just around college age.
So why is this the case? Why do students develop such high rates of stress, anxiety and depression? Why is suicide an issue among bright, young people? To answer this question we must deconstruct the image of college — to be specific, the ideology of college being like the cover of a glossy brochure. Students are unable to deal with the work of college, the possibility of doing badly and the potential for not having continuous social success. It isn’t even as if it is only students doing poorly in college who feel stressed. Madison Holleran was a top student and track star at the University of Pennsylvania before she committed suicide last year; she is only one of the many examples of bright, popular and talented students cracking under the pressure of higher education.
After understanding the proclivity of college students to develop stress, our next step is to find a way to combat this. We must stop idealizing college. We must stop being quixotic about the college experience and stop demanding perfection of ourselves; it’s a disservice to our many talents and skills. Not being able to get a perfect grade in a class does not mean you are stupid. Not immediately finding a perfect group of friends does not make you a pariah. Gaining weight your freshman year doesn’t make you a slob — it makes you normal.
Placing a one-size-fits-all label on the college student about their experience is not only unfair, it’s silly. Our psychological health depends on us breaking out of these clichés and defining college independently. If we keep comparing us to the lives of others, or framing our real experiences with a lame phrase about the best years of our lives, we will end up psychotic. To be truly happy you need to try to avoid the temptation to compare and to try and live according to what works for you. College is an amazing opportunity, but it is one that is wasted when we focus too much on it living up to a hackneyed statement passed down by someone who isn’t even in college.