Title: Consequences of Poor Mental Health - Campus Health and Safety
Headings: Consequences of Poor Mental Health
Consequences of Poor Mental Health
Content: As a result, students with poor mental health may be sicker and use more health care services. Perhaps the most serious consequence of poor mental health is when a student goes as far as attempting or committing suicide. Suicide, which is considered to be the second-leading cause of death among young people, may be the tragic result or consequence of undetected or untreated mental health problems. Academic Impacts
Students report experiencing a host of academic difficulties as a result of having poor mental health. According to the 2005 National College Health Assessment (NCHA), conducted by the American College Health Association (ACHA), a considerable proportion of students said that mental health problems affected their individual academic performance, including receiving an incomplete, dropping a course, or receiving a lower grade in a class, on an exam, or an important project. In fact, four out of the five leading factors found to negatively affect students’ individual performance in the last year were related to mental health. These included stress (ranked first), sleep (third), concern for a troubled friend or family member (fourth), and depression, anxiety disorder, or seasonal affective disorder (fifth). These findings are not surprising in light of other data that illustrate how poor mental health negatively impacts academic success. For example, students with mental health problems like anxiety or depression tend to have lower grades and are more likely than their peers without these problems to drop-out of school prematurely. In fact, researchers estimate that approximately 5 percent of all college students, or more than 4.29 million people, never finished school because of a mental illness.