Factors affecting mental health of college students
Judging from the current general situation in our country’s colleges and universities, most college students are mentally healthy; however, there are also a considerable number of college students whose mental health status is not optimistic. According to a survey of 126,000 college students across the country, 20.3% have obvious psychological disorders. Despite this, only a very small number of students have received professional help in psychological counseling, and the vast majority do not really realize this problem, which to a certain extent cannot but illustrate the urgency, necessity and arduousness of mental health education.
Human mental health is an extremely complex dynamic process. There are various factors that affect mental health, including the individual’s own psychological quality and the influence of external environmental factors. As far as the current specific situation of college students is concerned, the factors affecting their mental health are mainly reflected in the following aspects:
Environmental changes
Psychological research shows that huge changes in an individual’s environment can also cause psychological stress in individuals. Although environmental changes are also part of life events, such changes have a more prominent impact on individual adaptation.
Changes in the living environment are a big challenge for freshmen. The main aspect of this change is to live independently and cope with all the trivial matters of life. In particular, many new students have the problem of being far away from their hometowns and relatives, and it will take some time for them to adapt.
But relatively speaking, it is far more difficult for college students to adapt to new interpersonal relationships than to adapt to the learning and living environment. Facing new students from all over the world with different styles and characteristics, it is very important to establish coordinated and friendly interpersonal relationships. Before entering school, most students have been living among familiar classmates or relatives, and their interpersonal relationships are relatively stable. Once you enter college, you will face a process of getting to know others again and establishing interpersonal relationships. The progress of this process will have a very large impact on university life as a whole. The common barriers to interpersonal relationships, communication, and adaptation among college students may all have a certain relationship with the interpersonal relationships in the freshmen stage.
Adaptation to the new environment also includes adaptation to changes in one’s own status. This change includes not only new learning content and learning methods, but also new interpersonal relationships, language expression ability and future development positioning. The new role requires college students to re-evaluate themselves and others and redesign the process of self. In the adaptation process, a basic feature is that college students hope to be outstanding in the new environment. For freshmen who have just experienced huge environmental changes, there is not only a problem of adapting to the external environment, but more importantly, they also face a process of self-adjustment. In the past, freshmen entrance education focused more on the former and paid less attention to the latter. In fact, it is the latter that has the greater impact on their mental health. Generally speaking, whether it is the adaptation to the learning and living environment, or the adaptation to changes in interpersonal relationships and self-status, it will greatly affect the mental health of college students at that time.
Academic Expectations
An important feature of college students’ learning is learning autonomy. Students become the main body of learning activities, and teachers are the guides of learning activities. Therefore, college students are facing huge changes in learning methods, learning content and learning habits, which also includes a re-evaluation of their own learning abilities.
Many students establish their own learning strengths in middle school and have high academic expectations. In college, I faced changes in academic expectations, lost academic advantages, and repositioned myself academically. If college students lack sufficient mental preparation and cannot properly accept and treat their academic achievements, their self-confidence will decrease, their inferiority complex will increase, and they may even experience strong jealousy and aggressive behavior.
The learning purposes, learning methods, and learning content of universities are all different from those of middle schools. As society’s requirements for college students increase and employment standards change, many college students must not only learn professional knowledge, but also take some elective courses. If college students have improper learning methods, weak learning motivation, unclear learning goals, and weak self-discipline, they are prone to emotional reactions such as anxiety and tension. At the same time, their self-confidence will be seriously affected, and psychological problems such as distress and self-denial will occur, leading to academic failure. . Unsatisfactory academic performance and even academic failure greatly affect students’ mental health.
Interpersonal relationships
College students have relatively little experience in communicating and getting along with others. Establishing a harmonious interpersonal relationship in a short period of time often requires a lot of skills. College students often only feel the importance and pressure of this issue, but lack the necessary experience and skills. Interpersonal relationships reflect more of people’s personality traits and communication patterns. Therefore, college students’ interpersonal relationships are related to self-awareness and cognition of others. On the one hand, they have great expectations for good interpersonal relationships and hope to establish harmonious, friendly, and sincere interpersonal relationships. But at the same time, this kind of expectation is often too idealistic, that is, it requires or expects too much from others, resulting in dissatisfaction with the interpersonal relationship. This dissatisfaction will in turn have a negative impact on their interpersonal relationships. The contradiction between the psychological need for communication and the psychological blockage is combined.
The most important interpersonal relationship among college students is the opposite-sex relationship, which includes both the development of friendship between the two sexes and the growth of love. Re-recognize and establish one’s own position and coordinates in the relationship with the opposite sex. Some college students are at a loss when faced with the pursuit of the opposite sex. They don’t know how to refuse, how to love, and how to grasp the temperature of love; some college students put love before On top of studies, I even think that love is everything. When the blow of lovelorn hits, I am not fully mentally prepared and I don’t know how to deal with the breakup and face myself strategically.
Self-awareness
College life is always colorful and desirable. However, after college students enter college, due to the changes in their study life, their own strengths and other factors, most people’s self-evaluation also gradually changes. These are not only reflected in academic performance and daily life, but also in aspects such as knowledge, social experience, interpersonal communication and individual comprehensive abilities. Self-perception can also experience bipolar oscillations. It is easy to be conceited when achieving some results, and to feel inferior when encountering setbacks. It is very important for every college student to constantly adjust self-perception.
As a group of college students with outstanding academic performance among their peers, there is always a considerable gap between their actual self and their ideal self. Insufficient understanding of this objective fact will cause cognitive conflicts, which will seriously affect the psychological state of college students. In the face of objective reality, some college students can adjust their understanding of themselves in a timely manner and re-establish goals to meet the requirements of objective reality; while some college students try to escape conflicts with reality and develop mental states such as depression, decadence, depression, or depression. Indulging in fun, indulgence, and venting dissatisfaction with reality can numb one’s own mind and even breed serious psychological problems such as suicidal tendencies.
Young people at the university stage have become strongly aware of ‘self’ and have also noticed the fragility of the self, thus creating a strong need to enrich themselves and develop themselves. Some students failed to achieve the desired goals in the pursuit of self-development, resulting in adverse psychological reactions. Some students have magnified their own weaknesses and ignored their strengths in the process of self-development. They have adopted defense mechanisms out of fear of exposing their weaknesses, lack necessary social support, and even have serious worries, fears, and insecurities.
family environment
The influence of the family mainly includes four aspects: the emotional atmosphere of the family, the parenting attitude and family structure, and the family’s economic status. Family is the cornerstone of life, and parents are their children’s first teachers. Their impact on students’ growth and success is long-lasting and far-reaching. The emotional atmosphere of the family is the prerequisite for the formation of good psychological quality. The language and interpersonal atmosphere among family members directly affect the psychology of each member of the family, and have special significance for college students with gradually mature personalities. Parents’ parenting attitudes and educational methods directly affect children’s behavior and psychology. Democratic, equal rather than commanding, condescending, enlightened rather than autocratic, subtle rather than blindly pampering parenting attitudes and educational methods are conducive to the healthy development of students’ psychology. ; Changes in family structure such as single-parent families, reorganized families and other factors will inevitably have a certain impact on the psychology of college students who are studying; family economic conditions, especially students from difficult or even poor families, are prone to psychological discomfort. The impact of psychological problems on students caused by their family environment is far-reaching and long-lasting.
Link to this article: https://m.psyctest.cn/article/0lxnpQGJ/
If the original article is reprinted, please indicate the author and the source in the form of this link.
