Anxiety is now the No. 1 mental health issue plaguing college students

Anxiety is now the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, knocking depression into the number two slot.

The American College Health Association says one in six college students have been diagnosed with, or treated for, anxiety within the last year.

It starts in high school, with the pressure of getting into college. But once they’re attending college, without their parents around to guide them, many find themselves overwhelmed and panicked.

“I think college students are under a tremendous amount of pressure,” said Ellen Taylor, director of the University of Washington’s counseling center. “I also think we have a generation of students who have not as effectively learned to sooth themselves through the tough times, and to sort of tolerate disappointment and distress.”

“We see a lot of students who don’t have those good coping skills. They’ve been protected from disappointment and failure,” she said. “You learn to ride a bike by falling off. So we’re really working at building up those coping and resilience skills.”

College counseling centers around the country are packed, not because anxiety is new, but because the stigma of getting help is melting away.

Alysha Greig just graduated from the UW with a philosophy degree.

“This is my sixth year at UW,” Greig said. “So mental heath has played a huge role in my ability to finish school.”

Her issues with anxiety are paralyzing.

“There’s one instance where I had studied really hard for a final exam and I had done really great on the course for the whole quarter,” Greig said. “I walked into the room and I realized that everyone had these scantron sheets; what you use to take the exam.”

“It’s not a big deal, it always happens, someone has an extra,” she said. “I just stood there and had a panic attack. I just left and I didn’t take the exam and failed the class.”

Greig noted how difficult it is to explain anxiety to people who have never experienced its unreasonable hold.

“It’s hard to describe to people who don’t have anxiety because it’s such an illogical thing,” Greig said. “Now I can look back and say, ‘I was prepared for it, I could have taken it.’ That’s just one example of how much of an effect it can have.”

I know a lot of people listening might be rolling their eyes, wondering why millennials can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps like they did at that age.

“I think it’s really easy for people in my generation to say, ‘Oh, come on, it’s always been stressful, it’s always been difficult.’ And that’s true,” Taylor said. “[But] I think the current pressure around getting a job, the pressure around succeeding &#8212 we have just created this tremendous expectation of what life is supposed to be like. I think life is more stressful.”

“I think our whole culture is a high anxiety, high pressure culture that we’ve created,” she said. “We expect things to happen quickly and immediately.”

She also thinks social media plays a big role.

“People are able to present on social media, their successes, how happy they are, and I think that feeds the tendency to walk across campus and see other people and think, ‘Everyone’s happy except for me,'” Taylor said. “I think social media has really heightened that sense. I think we’ve created a society in which it’s really hard to have healthy solitude. We can text each other, we can be in each other’s mind space 24/7.”

Eager to do something proactive, Greig, a yoga teacher, established the UW Mindfulness Project, and she plans on running it next year, as a graduate.

“Where we can have things like yoga and meditation. Mindfulness-based activities that encourage students to kind of break away from that chaotic college student lifestyle,” Greig said. “[To] connect with themselves and each other in a way that I don’t think a lot of people get on a day-to-day basis right now.”

The classes are free and Greig says students often express their gratitude for having a place to relieve stress and have a judgement-free place to talk about what’s bothering them.