Feature Story
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I'm not alone: Understanding anxiety among U.S. college students
By Kelsey Bell, Penn State Student Science Writer
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When you wake up in the morning to hit snooze on your alarm, you don’t really know what that day has in store for you. It could be one of the good days, where you don’t have any incidents. Or, it could be a bad day where your anxiety decides to take over and change all your plans. The uncertainty alone makes every day a bit unsettling and challenging for a college student to handle amidst remembering to finish all your assignments and worrying about your exam.
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It might be easier to hide behind the mental health stories of college friends and classmates, ignoring your own story to tell as if you don’t really have a problem. However, one of the first hurdles to mental health issues is acknowledging you have a problem, so here I go.
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As a graduate student at Penn State, I’ve gone through my entire college career trying to manage my anxiety. One of the hardest parts about the whole experience is finding the words to fully explain your feelings to others and even to yourself. It’s as if I’m fine in one moment and getting on with my day like there is no worry at all. Then, all of a sudden, it hits like a punch. In this moment, my entire body and mind become overwhelmed, debilitating me from carrying on as before. All I want to do is shut myself off from the world, unable to even leave my room.
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But what are those feelings that completely overwhelm you? I don’t even know as I go through one of my punches of anxiety. Sometimes, it feels like a fear of the unknown, of change or uncertainty. Other times, it just becomes a desire to not put myself out there in the world. The worst part of the whole thing is that I have no control over the matter as I’ve just got to ride through the storm when it decided to hit.
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I really started noticing these episodes my junior and senior year of high school. The first panic attack I experienced came while I was sitting in my mother’s car, waiting to go into some event with students in my local area. However, my reluctance to go in mixed with my social anxiety to such a point that a panic attack ensured. It felt like all my emotions were conflicting with each other, overwhelming my brain so much that I couldn’t talk myself off the cliff as so to speak. I just had to sit there in the passenger seat of my mom’s car frozen in place as I uncontrollably cried and hyperventilated until the attack subsided.
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However, I am not alone in this matter. A 2018 study by Prof. Sarah Ketchen Lipson and team describes trends U.S. college students have been experiencing in terms of mental health issues. The study reports on the use of mental health service by college students, finding “the rate of treatment increased from 19% in 2007 to 34% by 2017, while the percentage of students with lifetime diagnoses increased from 22% to 36%.”
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“Anxiety affects every facet of my daily life especially those pertaining to social interactions,” stated Penn State undergraduate student Ashley Morris. “It can sometimes be difficult to manage and has interfered with my day to day activities before.”
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Anxiety is more spontaneous for Kayla Laughton, a Penn State graduate student. When an episode hits, “tears well up in my eyes and I’ll be short of breath,” explained Laughton. “This distracts me from my work for at least 10 minutes and it’s not fun.”
Regardless of each students’ own experience, mental health problems have risen in prevalence across many U.S. college campuses throughout this decade. The Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State conducts an annual report on mental health trends being experienced by college students.
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In 2018, the center concluded that “anxiety and depression continue to be the most common concerns of students and the most common overall concerns.” Even though “anxiety did not increase in prevalence for the first time in four years,” depression did end up increasing in prevalence according to the center.
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But why? Why am I one among many who go off to college and see a worsening in our mental health problems? Why does the anxiety medication not help us completely overcome our pain?
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On a quest to understand his own mental health problems, journalist and author Johann Hari interviewed social scientists and lead experts across the world to gain a new understanding about depression and anxiety.
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“When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling, like pain was leaking out of me. I couldn’t control it, I didn’t understand why it was happening and I felt quite ashamed of it,” Hari explained to a crowd at the TED Summit 2019. “My doctor said, “We know why people get like this. Some people just naturally get a chemical imbalance in their heads. All we need to do is give you some drugs, it will get your chemical balance back to normal.”
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Just like Hari, I finally had reached a point where I was tired of not understanding why I was experiencing what I was experiencing by my freshman year of college. I scheduled an appointment with my family doctor and stopped into his office when I was home on break. After briefly discussing my inconstant feelings and panic attacks, the doctor told me the possible solutions to my problems. I ended up leaving the office with a prescription for low-dose anxiety medication in hand and a belief that I would automatically be fixed, though that quickly proved to be wrong.
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“I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat… And I felt much better, I got a real boost,” Hari explained during his talk. “But not very long afterwards, this feeling of pain started to come back.”
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Hari had enough after thirteen years on high-doses of medication. He started questioning the doctor’s explanation, or at least began to realize it oversimplified his mental health problems. “I started asking myself, “What’s going on here? Because you’re doing everything you’re told to do by the story that’s dominating the culture. Why do you still feel like this?”
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Taking a prescribed medicine for her anxiety, Laughton has wondered the same thing. The medication has helped to a degree, but her anxiety is still always there. “As students, we are influenced by outside factors every day. Solely focusing on biological factors limits the scope of influence that contributes to our mental health issues,” stated Laughton.
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In my own journey, I never really felt my doctor understood the depth of my problems. I honestly still don’t quite understand my anxiety and how hard it hits or the feelings I experience when I’m going through an attack.
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It was this confusion and desire to fully understand the causes of his own depression and anxiety that led Hari to thoroughly investigate and ultimately publish his journey in a new book. “I think at the heart of what I learned is, so far, we have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety,” Hari shared with the audience.
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Only two factors are directly connected with our biology. “But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology. They are factors in the way we live,” Hari explained.
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“Every human being has natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you,” Hari shared. “But we’ve been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs.”
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It’s clearly not the only reason people like myself and Johann Hari struggle with mental health problems on a daily basis. College students especially become victims of this imbalance as they are thrown into their first experiences of adulthood with society’s pressure of trying to figure out the direction of their lives by their 18th birthdays. Biology still plays an important part in the process, but acknowledging the psychological and social dimension of anxiety might be “the key reason why this crisis keeps rising and rising.”
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“Biological factors can only take you so far. But discussing how social situations and stimuli trigger my anxiety episodes has helped me see how I can handle my anxiety every day of my life,” stated Morris.