For the third year in a row, the Healthy Minds Study—an annual nationwide effort co-led by a Boston University researcher—indicates that the mental health of college students is improving.
The team surveyed more than 84,000 US college students, finding a fall in the number of students experiencing moderate or severe depressive symptoms, moderate or severe anxiety symptoms, and suicidal ideation. They also found that more students are seeking professional help and medication.
While these changes are undoubtedly a good thing, Sarah K. Lipson, a study principal investigator and a BU School of Public Health associate professor of health law, policy, and management, says that we should still be keeping a close eye on student mental health.
“This is still an urgent problem, and there’s a lot of inequalities that persist,” she says. “There’s a lot of reasons to still be paying very close attention to student mental health, but there’s also, for the first time in a long time, a little bit of good news and motivation for schools to keep on doing some of the things that they’ve been doing.”
The number of students experiencing symptoms of severe depression dropped to 18%, compared to 23% in 2022, and suicidal ideation was down to 11%, from 15% in 2022. However, more than half of students still report experiencing loneliness, and substance use among students continues to rise.
The study is conducted by the Healthy Minds Network, led by researchers at BU, the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health, and Wayne State University. The 2024-2025 study had responses from students at 135 colleges and universities—including BU—and over 9,000 faculty and staff members from 22 institutions. This is the second year that campus employees have been included in the survey.
Here, Lipson digs into the study’s findings and how college students can improve their mental health:
At the same time, there are factors that are really outside of an institution’s control, things like the sociopolitical climate or social media. So one of the indicators that we ask schools to pay really close attention to in the Healthy Minds Network is how much students think mental health is a priority on their campus—how supportive they think their campus is to mental health, their sense of belonging on campus. Of course, we want to see depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation decreasing, but when there are factors outside of the boundaries of a college or university, the things that are more in their control are things like how students feel at their campus in terms of mental health and well-being.
About 75% of lifetime mental health problems like depression or anxiety will onset by around age 25. So, there’s a unique opportunity for early intervention, prevention, and identification of students and trying to link them to services while they’re in college.
Seeking out coping skills, looking for what resources exist, like groups or digital mental health interventions or one-on-one counseling therapy, is really beneficial. And then when you’re in that environment of seeking out a service, to almost be a little bit selfish with it and say, “I have goals, I have things that I want to accomplish in this.” Being shy or withholding is not going to serve that goal. You need to say these are the things you’re really struggling with. You need to be vulnerable.
I was expecting to see some shifts, but at least between fall ’24 and spring ’25, we didn’t see many changes. We even looked specifically at data from international students or LGBTQ+ students. The inequalities still exist, but the magnitude of those inequalities didn’t shift, which was a bit of a surprise to me. We’ll continue to be monitoring and looking at that. One caveat is that, particularly with international students, enrollment patterns have changed. We are only surveying the students who are at school.
Now, we have an approach where, when the survey is ending, we thank students and we say, “Would you like some feedback about your responses? Would you like to see what your data looked like?” And then we talk them through the major screening tools and give them specific resources. The end of the survey is intended to be a tailored resource for students, where we work with each school to identify the resources that they want suggested to students based on their results. And then we also have national resources that we promote. I think that’s probably something that many students aren’t aware of when they’re considering whether to take the time to take the survey.
Source: Boston University
—
This post was previously published on FUTURITY.ORG and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
—
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: iStock.com
