Why Schools Are Causing So Many Students To Struggle With Anxiety And Depression
Over the past decade, the number of teens who have symptoms of depression or anxiety has increased significantly.
Pic: Pexels Creative Commons / Startup Stock Photos
School is one of the main factors of growing up and guiding us to adult life, with friendships, social skills and conflicts to go with it. In the last 10 years, however, the amount of teens experiencing who have symptoms of depression or anxiety has grown. The NHS have stated that “24% of 14-year-old girls in the UK report symptoms of depression.”
So why is this happening?
I believe that schools have high expectations of students and expect nothing less than perfect. However, the majority of the time, this causes students to go into a negative state of mind. They will likely feel as if they’re not smart enough for the task at hand.
Schools must know the emotional effect education has on the students, yet they seem to do nothing about it. No matter how we’re feeling, or what we did to try and achieve our targets, all they look at is our scores. Then they compare our results with other schools, which then leads us to be ranked. This is not healthy for students or even teachers.
Pic: Pexels Creative Commons / Jean-Daniel Francoeur
With the amount of work we do at school, and then at home, we barely get a chance to breathe. Schools are in competition with each other, but that should not be passed down to the students by making the quality and quantity of work increase. It puts a strain on teens emotionally and can make them feel unmotivated to do anything at all.
Teens are told that it’s okay to make mistakes. Yet when those mistakes happen, punishments are the first thing that comes to mind for many schools.
I think the wellbeing of teenagers in schools is not being handled properly. This means that a lot of young have to deal with issues they have themselves. The only way a student is going to enjoy school is if they have fun sometimes, and are allowed to relax and take a break sometimes too. They are not going to be able to do that if they’re stressing over a bad exam score or if they feel too under pressure.