Something seems a little strange when you stroll through the hallways of practically any American high school on a Tuesday morning. It’s just a low, constant hum of tiredness, neither dramatic nor obvious. In between classes, students are glued to their phones, their shoulders taut, and they move with a mechanical efficiency that belies their sixteen years of age. It’s possible that the majority of adults pass it without giving it any thought. However, it is now impossible to ignore the numbers.
Approximately 85% of students in the 1950s scored lower on anxiety tests than the average American high school student today. Take a moment to sit with that. Compared to the overall student body of a time when polio outbreaks and Cold War drills were commonplace, rather than to some anomalous group. Approximately 25% of teenagers suffer from anxiety disorders, a number that has increased steadily over the past three decades and doesn’t appear to be leveling off. Across the nation, school psychologists, teachers, and counselors are watching this develop and, in many cases, feeling genuinely unprepared for what’s coming.
Teachers believe the change has been slow enough to become the norm. Every year is a little worse than the last, and every graduating class has a little more weight than the previous one. Many students have simply run out of steam by high school, whether it be emotionally, socially, or academically. Early on, the pressure builds up. For many teenagers, there is no true off switch due to increased testing frequency, increased competition for college placement, and a blurring of the boundaries between school life and digital life. Their phones, bedrooms, and homes are all affected by the anxiety.
Growing family instability, increased academic expectations, and the growth of psychological vocabulary that has made it easier to name the feeling—though naming it hasn’t necessarily meant treating it—are some of the compounding factors that researchers tracing this history point to. A 21-year-old mental health advocate who struggled with extreme anxiety during his first semester of college talked about holding everything inside for months before finally losing it in a counselor’s office. “It was a huge relief,” he said. That is not an uncommon tale. It may be the most prevalent narrative in American education at the moment.
The success stories are more difficult to locate, but they do exist. A few districts across the nation have discreetly begun constructing real infrastructure, going beyond awareness campaigns. Instead of waiting for crises to worsen, Connecticut, for example, developed a model that places child-behavior specialists right into failing schools. Based on the idea that diagnosing anxiety at age four is preferable to treating it at age seventeen, some districts are experimenting with early mental health screenings well before kindergarten. It’s still unclear whether the political will endures, whether these interventions scale, and whether they endure budget cycles.
Hard not to notice, though, that the schools doing something share a common thread: they stopped treating mental health as a sidebar to academic performance and started treating it as the foundation beneath everything else. That reframing sounds simple. In practice, given how American schools are funded and evaluated, it’s genuinely difficult.
The epidemic isn’t quiet because students are hiding it. The institutions that surround them have been slow to pay attention, which is why it’s quiet. Now some people are paying attention. The more unsettling question is still whether that’s sufficient and whether it’s timely.
