College students’ mental health has worsened in recent years, with higher numbers of students reporting symptoms of emotional distress and seeking mental health services. Georgetown University has not escaped these national trends, and faculty are eager to respond.
While mental health awareness is important, recent research advises caution — some ways of introducing such awareness to young adults have been shown to cause harm. Imagine an intervention teaching students to recognize signs of meningitis. Knowing these signs will not increase someone’s chances of having meningitis. In contrast, many symptoms of emotional disorders are responsive to how we understand them. For some people, thinking about mental health issues, “trying them on” in their mind and incorporating them into their identity triggers or worsens distress.
Instead of encouraging students to expand their concepts of mental illness or apply it to themselves, faculty should promote social connections, which significantly improve mental health.
Recently, researchers have observed that mental health concepts increasingly capture qualitatively new and less severe phenomena — what the psychologist Nicholas Haslam calls “concept creep.” Take trauma, for example. Once reserved for events involving extreme threat or violence, the concept now encompasses a wider range of experiences and lower levels of severity — a shift seen across both clinical literature and popular culture. This process is not without merit. Greater sensitivity to harm can increase awareness and destigmatization. But, as distinctions between levels of severity collapse, everyday experience risks being viewed as a sign of mental illness.
Moreover, concepts don’t just describe experience. They offer a lens through which experiences are interpreted, labeled and felt. Introducing these concepts in the classroom as problems for which students are at risk may prompt those students to excessively self-monitor for symptoms and self-diagnose, increasing distress for a meaningful subset of students.
As a Georgetown student, Sonia Fan (CAS ’27) began to notice how this plays out in everyday life. It often starts subtly — with the increasing casual use of terms like “traumatizing” or “anxiety” in ordinary conversation. We do not dismiss these experiences or call into question the real emotions they describe. Instead, what has struck Sonia most is how exposure to these narratives begins to reshape one’s own understanding of distress. When you repeatedly hear classmates describe how their anxiety interferes with daily functioning, it becomes difficult not to ask where your own experiences fall.
Although college is undeniably stressful, there is a difference between stress and anxiety. This distinction can begin to blur without a clear sense of what is and is not normal. Sonia noticed this shift most clearly after a particularly difficult exam. Her heart was racing, her stomach was unsettled — familiar physical symptoms after prolonged stress. As she stood there waiting for her body to settle, she found herself wondering if this was anxiety. That thought alone seemed to intensify the feeling. What had begun as a transient physiological response became something harder to shake — a self-sustaining loop of attention and interpretation.
Concept creep changes not only how we talk about distress, but how we experience it. When structural pressures — academic intensity, lack of sleep — are increasingly reframed as individual pathologies, responsibility subtly shifts. Students are encouraged to locate and label the problem within themselves, to understand their normal-if-unpleasant reactions as symptoms of a disorder and to seek individualized accommodations. In the process, we risk losing sight of the fact that much of this distress is ordinary, shared and survivable. Building the collective capacity to bear it together may serve students better than teaching each of them to understand themselves as uniquely impaired by it.
Our recommendation is straightforward: unless they are teaching specialized courses, faculty should avoid raising awareness of mental illness as checklists of symptoms applicable to students. At the same time, checking in with students who disappear from the classroom or show signs of distress is invaluable. These check-ins can include discussing what has been observed, listening without diagnosing and connecting students to support when needed. If in doubt, faculty should consult deans or activate existing mental health resources.
More broadly, the goal should be to strengthen students’ sense of agency and resilience. One of the most effective ways to do this is through social connection. Feeling embedded in relationships, classrooms and communities helps students contextualize distress and recover from it. Encouraging connection and opportunities to help others are simple but powerful approaches to improve wellbeing.
Supporting students as they engage in academic activities that make them anxious, such as public speaking, can also help. Anxiety is fueled by avoidance. Engaging in such situations can increase students’ stress in the short term, but lower their anxiety long-term. It can also increase their self-efficacy, or the sense that they can take risks and succeed. Moreover, empowering students to take care of themselves by exercising, eating, and sleeping better will never go amiss.
Students already live in face-to-face and virtual contexts that bombard them with invitations to consider whether they have a variety of mental illnesses. We cannot control these broader forces, but we can be very judicious about what we add to them.
Sonia Fan is a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences and Yulia Chentsova Dutton is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology.