Thanks to growing social awareness, mental health is a topic we are openly talking about in society and at school. 

This is amazing, but no one seems to be talking about or researching how students’ mental health changes over the course of the school year. 

There have been many studies done on mental health by stress, but I did not find any research focused  solely on school and how as the year goes on it affects kids mental health. 

Personally, school affects my mental health so much and really can drag me down into a bad depression, and just cause me so much stress and anxiety! 

So I was curious how school affected my friends and peers, so I conducted my own research by asking them. 

I asked them to consider how their mental health was at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. They used a rating from one to ten. 

A one represented the worst mental health they have experienced and ten represented the best of their life.

The results were not that surprising to me; of the people I asked, 65%  reported feeling worse mental health now than they had in the beginning of the year.

Why? Shouldn’t the return of daylight and summer being around the corner improve students’ mental health? 

I think that data really does say something about the school system and how it affects a majority of students mentally.

Mental health is a growing issue; in fact, one in 20 Americans live with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression. The majority comes from a younger population.