By Hrichita Paul
Picture by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
The link between Mental Health & Academics is very significant in this day and age and yet awareness lacks for the same.
Almost every student is suffering nowadays, the ones who excel, the average ones, and the bottom liners, and why is that? Over the years, we’ve seen a massive importance given to academic excellence, and well, that has been building as a pressure and affecting every student’s mental health. Students often contemplate, “When will this end?”
While focusing on academic excellence, we’ve somewhere lost the moral values that contribute to an excellent personality. Envy among students is a common issue nowadays. There are instances where students steal study materials from their classmates, tear books and notebooks down, cause disturbances, and poke fun simply to get their classmates down on rank. This is so out of touch with what books teach unless they are trying to learn how to become the villain from the moral science textbook stories.
Our focus was supposed to be on learning, but students have been swayed away from real learning and are instead pushed on to perform like puppets in a mechanical system that decides their value with grades. I don't believe this is the world you want to live in.
It is simply tiring to see this competition and be in this competition, and one might hope that it gets better after high school, but it does not, and this same toxic mindset and unnecessary competition are brought to workplaces when they enter service. Unfortunately, we are unable to see past this competition and break the cycle of constantly judging ourselves and competing with others.
We hear terrifying news of young students committing suicide because they can't cope with the academic pressure and demands of society. As if academic excellence means life, and the problem is it means life from the perspective society paints. The economic crisis is one of the root problems behind this. At least for the people below the poverty line and the lower-middle class. People simply are not paid enough, and unless and until this inequality of income is addressed, the blame will be put on students; they will be required to satisfy unreliable expectations, and they will be made to perform harder beyond their limits and interests, destroying their mental health and physical health altogether.
All of it is not worth it. We as a society need to understand this and tackle this issue. Otherwise, the future looks grave. A sweet spot of balance is what is needed to produce a well-learned citizen, not someone with a poor personality with tons of degrees to boast of. The change begins with us.
Have you slept enough today? Have you smiled today? Have you talked to your dear ones today?
These are some of the questions that we should start asking ourselves. It is so easy to get lost in our worlds built on anxieties that we lose touch with the real world. Academic anxiety is just not worth it.
Teachers, educators, guardians, and educational institutes have a responsibility to create a student’s life, so it is for them to be a part of the change and spread awareness. It is for them to ensure that no student sacrifices their mental health due to academic anxiety. We, as responsible citizens, need to do the minimum towards creating a better future for each one of us.
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