ABSTRACT
A recent survey with 150,000 first-year students from more than 200 universities in the United States found that only about half of the students—the lowest number since the survey began—rated their emotional health as “above average or highest 10%,” whereas the number reporting “frequently feeling depressed in the past year” rose to almost 10%—a 3.4 percentage point increase relative to five years ago (Eagan et al., 2014). The college years, although a time of intellectual, emotional, and social growth, are laden with subtle and overt pressures: learning to individuate from parents, succeeding academically, getting along with roommates, exploring sexuality, fitting in, fulfilling extracurricular demands, feeling pressure to perform optimally given the high costs of a college education, surviving financial challenges, and finding identity amidst an increasingly diverse campus (Kadison & DiGeronimo, 2004). Several of these pressures appear to be most salient during transition periods, such as the freshman year in undergraduate education. Similar patterns of increased distress have been shown among first-year law and other graduate and professional students (see Chapter 8, this volume), which suggests that this is not merely a matter of age—it is also a matter of rapid change and new transitions.
