Student Mental Health and Well-being

A significant percentage of college students suffer from stress, anxiety, depression, and other issues affecting their well-being and mental health. Mental health was the most common reason given for college students withdrawing or thinking about withdrawing from college, as a recent State of Higher Education Study found:

Between 50% and 53% of Black, Hispanic and White students report that emotional stress is the top reason they considered stopping their coursework, followed by 41% to 43% who said it was personal mental health reasons, and 29% to 33% cited cost.

About a quarter of currently enrolled students also mentioned coursework difficulty or a lack of belonging. This lack of belonging may be related to inclusive experiences at school. Twenty-one percent of Black students — compared with 14% of Hispanic students and 15% of their White peers — also reported they felt discriminated against frequently or occasionally at school.

Here are some resources with strategies to support and better understand student mental health and well-being, in and out of the classroom:

• “Woven in”: Mental Health and College Graduation Rates
• Five ways to help college students cope with academic pressure
• Trauma-aware Teaching Checklist
• New toolkit on embedding mental health into the curriculum
• Is college stressing you out? It could be the way your courses are designed
• Degrees of Distress: How Higher Education Institutions Hurt and Help Student Mental Health
• Decision and Resource Tree Aids in Supporting Student Mental Health
• Studying Mental Health Problems as Systems, Not Syndromes

Mindfulness Interventions

Mindfulness involves being more aware of your present thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and environment. Activities to promote mindfulness can be as short as stopping for a few moments to pause and reflect (see this STOP video) or as in-depth as this 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.

Benefits of mindfulness shown by research include:​

• Reducing:​
  • Stress​
  • Anxiety​
  • Depression​
  • Procrastination
  • Bad habits​
  • Burnout
  • Implicit bias
• Improving:​
  • Critical thinking​
  • Creativity
  • Problem-solving​
  • Resilience​
  • Well-being​
  • Helping behavior
  • Sleep
  • Healthy eating​
• Benefits for first-generation students and students going through the transition to college​
• Benefits everyone – teachers, professors, employees, parents…

More Resources on Mindfulness

• Self-assessment: Mindfulness Self-Assessment: Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS) and a shorter version
• 8 Week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course (MBSR)
• Benefits of mindfulness and downsides – it has many benefits but is not a silver bullet and doesn’t address often underlying structural problems that can cause stress and other issues (under-staffing, under-funding, pandemic, bias, etc.)
• Mindfulness in the Classroom
• Sample mindfulness activities used in a course
• Incorporating mindfulness into a composition course
• Implementing Mindfulness in Schools: An Evidence-Based Guide
• Coloring activity for test anxiety
• Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance course
• Mindfulness apps
  • Headspace
  • Calm
  • Smiling Mind for kids