School, a place meant to provide the necessary education for teenagers, has started to shift from maximizing a student’s human potential to a place where students’ mental health begins to derail.
One of the primary sources of stress for high school students is the pressure to excel academically. It’s becoming increasingly more common these days to find students who suffer from mental health disorders like anxiety, depression and burnout, which can be greatly attributed to the significant amount of work students have to bear.
Conditions such as these can cause the idea of tests, homework and grades to feel much heavier than they should. Students feel pressured to give 110% to their academic life, which fosters perfectionism, intense fear of failure and, worst of all, burnout.
Students, especially those enrolled in AP and Honors classes, feel like they have to meet certain standards to justify their intelligence, like enrolling in traditionally difficult AP classes such as Physics, Chemistry, Calculus and Literature. Whereas those who are not enrolled in many challenging classes may feel as though they aren’t doing enough.
This pursuit of finding validation through academic performance can take a serious toll on mental health, leaving students feeling mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted.
Of course, burnout, depression, and anxiety are not just limited to AP and Honors students.
No mental health occurrences are ever limited to these particular students, regardless of the stereotype that this class level brings to the conversation. These perceptions do not mean that AP courses make any specific student’s life more difficult than another student’s.
There can be tremendous benefits in taking more challenging courses, as they help students build skills and confidence necessary for college. But when you find yourself signing up for five, six or maybe seven AP classes at a time, one has to ask, “Am I doing too much?”
At the end of the day, no amount of mental fatigue is worth an A on your transcript. No matter how hard you try to justify it. School should be about preparation, growth, and learning — not burning out just thinking about the topic of school.
So, to answer the question if academic pressure damaging your mental health, the answer, simply put, is that it depends.
It’s not entirely the school’s fault, but rather a combination of the system’s unrealistically high standards, emphasis on achievements and a student’s own ambitions.
Until schools and students alike can come to the realization that balance matters just as much as academic performance, the cycle of stress and fatigue will continue.
