This article will tell you what education and mental health are and how education affects some students’ mental health during and after leaving the academically focused environment.
Mental Health
Mental health is an overall emotional and psychological state that can affect many parts of one’s everyday life. It can affect how you think, feel, act, deal with different situations, and cope with stress.
Mental health disorders can affect your physical health and other parts of your daily life. When severe, some of the most common mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, can cause people to isolate or, in some very extreme cases, kill themselves.
Things that can affect mental health:
- Negative life experiences, such as trauma, abuse etc.
- Your family’s history of mental health problems
- Biological factors such as brain chemistry and genes
Mental health is important because it can affect your everyday life and physical health.
Education
Education is the process of obtaining knowledge through learning. So, an educated person can be thought of as someone who has been taught or learned knowledge or ability. highly educated people are usually taught at educational institutions like schools or universities.
Education in the modern day has many different levels to it. To be a highly educated person, you need to get your qualifications from further education such as a university.
Nowadays, highly educated people are more employable than those not as educated, with the same experience. This trend leads to a difference in wages and overall wealth in those with different levels of education.
Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomic status is determined by looking at someone’s social and economic position compared to others, usually based on income, education, and job. Nowadays, highly educated people are more employable than those not as educated, with the same experience. This trend leads to a difference in income and job in those with different levels of education. Employers’ preference for highly educated people has led to people of varying levels of educational attainment having their incomes based on how educated they are.
How can having a low socioeconomic status affect mental health?
Having a Low Socioeconomic Status (SES) can harm your mental health. Having a low SES is an excellent example of a negative life experience that can harm your mental health. Poverty can negatively affect your physical health and cleanliness/hygiene. These effects can keep you in poverty by making you ill and decreasing your chances for employment. This decrease in employment opportunities is because some people associate being unclean and in poverty with laziness. This discrimination affects employability and other social interactions, leading to an increased risk of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.
Being in an environment where food, money, and shelter are uncertain can increase the stress you are under and the risk of mental health issues.
How can having a high socioeconomic status affect mental health?
While having a low socioeconomic status (SES) can negatively affect your mental health. Having a high SES can decrease the probability of having mental health issues. So, money can’t buy you happiness, but it can reduce the risk of mental health issues.
Can mental health affect your socioeconomic status?
While the fact that low socioeconomic status (SES) can affect mental health by increasing stress and causing negative social interactions is more commonly known. The fact that mental health can affect socioeconomic status is less known.
In severe cases, mental health issues such as depression and anxiety can cause people’s income to drop by affecting their ability to work. Those who are depressed can have less motivation to properly manage their finances as they might feel it is not worth trying.
Mental health disorders like mania or hypomania can also cause you to make impulsive financial decisions. In contrast, others can make you avoid thinking about money.
To cope with stress or mental health issues like depression, you may try to spend money to give you a brief high, leading to overspending.
Education isn’t for everyone.
In most cases having a higher education will lead to better mental health. However, it can negatively affect their mental health in some cases.
For some, staying in education can have harmful effects on their mental health. Educational reforms during the early 1970s in Britain that increased the minimum leaving school age from 15 to 16 had resulted in minimal improvement in educational attainment and raised levels of inspiration. This reform had no impact on social mobility, which means it did not affect the students’ socioeconomic status.
However, Researchers discovered the reform to have increased students’ chances of getting depression and other mental health problems in adulthood.
The researchers’ results did not indicate that staying in school was the problem. They suggest forcing the lower-achieving students to remain in an academically focused environment that they could not thrive in was the problem. These results led researchers to declare that the reforms could have long term consequences on mental health.
How can awareness affect mental health?
Being aware of something means you have enough knowledge of it and can discern it. So, awareness is your ability to determine something and understand it with your understanding. Education can promote and develop students’ awareness as it increases the amount of knowledge a student has.
Being aware of mental health can decrease the risk of you having issues with your mental health as you can act and help yourself a lot earlier than those who are not aware. Educating yourself or being educated on mental health issues can help you prevent mental illness. As well as treat it as you know its general causes like chronic stress and treatments such as therapy.
So, education promotes and develops awareness which can decrease the risk of a mental health issue.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that education can affect your mental health directly by promoting awareness and indirectly by affecting your socioeconomic status.
If you are struggling with your mental health. In that case, there are many places to find help and support, whether it is from a GP (doctor), therapist councillor or even friends and family.
