“Why do so many young people have mental-health problems? The growing focus on students' anxiety and depression, while well-intentioned, may be making psychological distress seem inevitable. Instead of fostering a supportive community for adolescent and young-adult students with mental-health concerns, we may be reinforcing a false and destructive belief that misery is universal among young people.
Students regularly post self-deprecating social-media comments about how stressed they are, detailing their deteriorating mental health and inability to stop doomscrolling. These declarations are more than venting or seeking social support. For some, they've become signals of virtue.
Students who want to improve the world -- and we believe most do -- seem to believe that happiness implies insensitivity to others' pain. It's a twist on the adage, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." Today it's more like, "If you're not miserable, you don't care." When joy does surface, it's often tempered with guilt, as if contentment signals naivete or indifference.
Despite evidence of increasing rates of anxiety and depression among young people, the assumption that psychological misery is their default state is empirically false. While the pandemic affected young people's mental health, recent research challenges the belief that rates of anxiety among young people have spiraled. Adolescents and young adults may exhibit slightly more negative emotionality than other age groups, but that doesn't mean distress defines them. Data from more than 85,000 young adults (all either current or recent college students) who took an online personality assessment through the Sapa Project reveals that nearly 50% found the description "am happy with my life" moderately or very accurate.
Focusing only on students' psychological distress ignores the complexity of human emotions. Everyday negative affectivity is normal and essential to the tapestry of our emotional lives. Positive and negative emotions aren't two ends of a single scale. Instead, these emotional experiences are relatively independent. You can be happy and sad. You can laugh at a funny video with your roommates and still care about climate change. You can find your courses stressful and still feel grateful to learn alongside peers.
We shouldn't approach every group of young people with the automatic assumption that they are stressed out, anxious and depressed. We should validate and support students facing mental-health challenges, but we need to calibrate that support more carefully. Emotions are contagious. When students internalize the idea that suffering is the norm, that norm -- even when inaccurate -- can foster a culture of misery. Given this group's vulnerability to social contagion, a perceived norm of misery could lead some students to suppress feelings of joy. Though suppressing one's emotions has a bad reputation, recent research demonstrates that inhibiting the expression of positive (not negative) emotions predicts lower well-being. In other words, hiding your happiness may make you less happy.
Neither of us wants to return to the days when seeking mental-health services was stigmatized. Students struggling with mental health need effective support. College students are navigating real stressors, including rising tuition, competitive job markets, the pandemic's aftershocks, and political and cultural shifts. But we must be careful with the stories we tell young people about themselves. If we insist their futures will be marred by inevitable, chronic malaise, they may come to believe us.
We can support students' mental health needs while normalizing resilience, emphasizing that a defining mark of being human is our ability to grow and adapt under pressure. By focusing so heavily on psychological suffering and too little on how normative resilience is, it's as if we've are playing R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" on repeat and then are surprised when students don't notice the next, crucial word in the lyrics: "sometimes."
We need to help students embrace the messy complexity of emotions. Students can also help combat "normative misery" by sharing happiness without apology. Faculty can show joy in scholarship and teaching by reminding students of an important truth: that curiosity and playfulness are central to the intellectual endeavor. Administrators can spotlight stories that celebrate balance and flourishing. If we want students to thrive, we must tell stories that reflect their struggles and strengths -- and remind them that joy, too, is part of the human condition.
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Mr. Mittal is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and director of the Institute for Adolescent Mental Health and Well-Being. Ms. Engeln is a professor of instruction in psychology at Northwestern and the institute's associate director.” [1]
1. How Young People Learn to Be Unhappy. Mittal, Vijay; Engeln, Renee. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Sep 2025: A15.
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