Category: Mental Health

When Alyssa Acompora began her career as a nurse in the intensive care unit, she threw her whole self into the job. As a former Division I swimmer at Fairfield University, that’s what she knew how to do: go all in. But unlike athletics, nursing didn’t offer external validation for her efforts, and before long, Acompora was burned out and considering leaving.

Acompora’s experience as a former collegiate athlete struggling to adjust to life after athletics isn’t unique. Many young adults who wrapped their entire lives and identities around their sport suffer as they attempt to transition to the real world. For that reason, Acompora created “Beyond the Athlete,” a counseling service aimed at helping former athletes discover their new purpose. 

“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete,” Acompora said. “But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”

Beyond the Athlete is one of a growing number of similar businesses, especially as athletes of all levels have started speaking up about mental health, helping move the needle in the right direction. With unique challenges, the transition period between end-of-college athletic career and real career warrants a unique solution.

“These athletes face an identity crisis, especially if their careers come to an end by force, which they usually do,” said Derrick Furlow, Jr., chief athletic officer at Onrise Mental Health Care for Athletes. “They’ve been a part of their sport for so long and usually haven’t given thought to what’s next.”

In a world where only two percent of the 460,000 N.C.A.A. athletes move on to the professional level, a sobering number of young athletes are left struggling. 

“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete. But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”

While some colleges are putting mental health support in place to help student-athletes adjust, many simply don’t have the resources, especially for those leaving the system. A 2022 survey from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) reveals that 90 percent of collegiate athletic directors do not feel their institutions provide adequate psychiatric support services for coaches and student-athletes.

Thankfully, former collegiate athletes are emerging to help those following in their footsteps. Their services take on different forms, but all have the same goal: to fill in the gaps that leave former student-athletes struggling as they adjust to a new world. 

Transition issues

When Acompora first began her nursing career, she did everything she could to be the best version out there. No matter how hard she worked, there were no gold medals to validate that effort. 

Like Acompora, understanding that life doesn’t offer external validation like athletics is something Tony Muskett has struggled with, as well. The 22-year-old recently graduated from the University of Virginia after finishing his football career there. “It used to be that when I had a big game, my social media would blow up all weekend,” he said. “Now, if I have a good day at the office, there’s no real acknowledgement. If you can’t find the internal motivation, you’ll struggle.” 

Acompora turned to therapy for help but found her therapists couldn’t relate. “They don’t think in an athlete mindset,” she explained. 

She kept trying, however, and eventually took some of the responsibility on herself, becoming a certified nurse coach, confidence coach, and athlete transformation coach. After eight years, Acompora began to pull out of her spin. “I began to identify patterns and habits of how I was trying to define myself,” she said. “I had to learn to internally validate myself.”

That meant identifying her core values, setting smaller goals and checkpoints, and celebrating herself along the way. This also carried over to her personal life, where Acompora learned to slow down, too. She took up yoga, surfing, and walking, defining consistency differently than she did as an athlete. “I realized I didn’t need to operate at full speed at 31 years old,” she said. “Many athletes feel like everything is a competition and that if they’re not going all out, they’re unproductive or lazy.” 

Muskett, who works in commercial real estate, admitted he was ill-prepared for the real world. He had his sights set on the N.F.L. draft, but injuries his senior year forced him to start thinking differently for the first time in his life. “For 20 years, I was programmed for football,” he said. “When you think about the possibility of life after football, it’s scary.” 

One reason for that, Muskett said, is that as a full-time athlete, you don’t have the time for internships and networking like other college students. Derrick Furlow said that’s a valid concern. “I was a football safety, so I was an anomaly who recognized I probably didn’t have a future at the pro-level,” he said. “I realized I needed to figure things out, so I started looking at the people around me to see who could expose me to other opportunities.” 

Not everyone thinks ahead like that, however, and many get stuck in the grieving process. “For most athletes, the game comes to an end, and its often not by choice,” Furlow said. “They will grieve the game, wish they had done more, and often experience anger about it.”

Jaimel Johnson, an all-American soccer player for the University of Tennessee who went onto a professional career, now works as an athlete mental health specialist at Onrise. “There are a lot of variables when you transition from school to after,” she said. “You’re trying to separate your identity from the field and figure out your value to the world.”

The helpers

In 1991, Brian Satola graduated from the University of Virginia, where he played football. He’s also the father to two student-athletes and has borne witness to how much things have changed. “There’s so much pressure on these student-athletes today,” he said. “Back when I was in school, the final whistle blew, we dropped off resumes, and found a job. Today, athletes are occupied with their sport full time and then must compete for jobs against kids who have done multiple internships and have stacked resumes.” 

During their time at school, these athletes have access to mental health resources. But when they graduate, they lose that structure. “A wall goes up and they’re left to dangle and figure it all out,” Satola said. “Colleges have limited resources to help and can’t provide the breadth of programming needed.”

For this reason, Satola recently helped found LAVA: Life After Virginia, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting U.Va. student-athletes as they navigate this transition. Working in partnership with the school and its athletic director, LAVA focuses on four key pillars: mentorship, mental wellness, alumni engagement, and career transition. “Many of these athletes don’t even know what they want to do after school, so we help pair them with alumni to get micro-internships,” he said. “We also let them hear alumni stories, so that they can understand how to launch a career.”

Satola started with a focus on the football players for now, with hopes that the model will expand to other sports at U.Va. He’s found an advocate in the coach and athletic director, who allow LAVA access to the student-athletes. “Without their support, the program doesn’t succeed,” he said. “The coach is a realist and understands the importance of mentorship and guidance for the players, and we begin offering that support from the start of the recruiting process.” 

Johnson would like to see these conversations begin even before high school. “I think we should get to a point where we start talking about the reality of what happens after sport at the youth level,” she said. 

The LAVA program models itself similarly to “4 For Forever” at the University of Notre Dame, whose intended goal is to support the student-athlete in a holistic manner, including preparing them for life after graduation. A former student-athlete created the Notre Dame program, and like U.Va., works with an external partner, called Life After Notre Dame. 

It was at a LAVA event that Muskett connected with Satola and to his first real job. “I’ve learned that I can apply some of the same principles I learned as an athlete to my career,” he said.

Identifying those assets, as well as what careers might be of interest, is key. “Athletes need to identify what transferable skills they have and what jobs might be good fits for that,” Furlow explained. “What are you good at? What do you do for free time that you enjoy?” 

Over their careers, these athletes have developed many transferrable skills, including time management, leadership, communication, and a hefty dose of confidence. But until someone points this out, they may not recognize how well they can apply those attributes in the real world. “We already possess the necessary skills,” said Alexis Hornbuckle, who played basketball at University of Tennessee and then won a W.N.B.A. championship with the Detroit Shock. “You’ve earned your athletic arrogance, and that comes across as confidence in a job interview. That can win in any space.” 

Conversely, that confidence can sometimes prove tricky. For athletes who are used to existing at the pinnacle of sport, understanding that they won’t be starting out as C.E.O. is a necessary reality check. Beyond the Athlete, Acompora’s organization, offers former athletes one-on-one mentorships to help them strategize a path forward and soon will add a community-focused membership, too. “Our goal is to help students keep the training wheels on for a while as they transition,” she said.  

Beyond the Athlete is relatively new, but in a nod to the fact that higher education is beginning to recognize the issues graduating athletes face, the organization is now an official partner of the NAIA. In this capacity, the organization provides mindset coaching, routine optimization, and identity creation. “There’s a growing recognition of the need for these services,” said Acompora. “Schools are learning that they need to care about athletes not just physically and mentally but to help them be well-rounded and prepared.”

Likewise, Onrise provides athletes with mental health specialists like Johnson, albeit in a business-to-business format. “We partner with organizations, and then the athletes can reach out to us without their coaches or anyone else knowing about it,” Furlow said. 

Onrise designed this format so that athletes have no hesitation asking for help. All its athlete mentors receive training in a “transition formula” that they can use with the student-athletes. Hornbuckle is one of those mentors. “In my era, we didn’t talk about mental health,” she said. “You didn’t want to be labeled as crazy. That’s changing, but we still want student-athletes to feel safe navigating this space.”

Hornbuckle added that, as a former athlete, she understands the issues students face, and how hard the end of a playing career can be. “It took me four years to truly retire,” she said. “When I quit, I felt like I was letting people down, and that sent me into a bad spiral.” 

The transition to the real world for student-athlete is highly individual, and all the newer organizations designed to help recognize that. The former student-athletes at the helm are uniquely equipped to understand the challenges the adjustment period presents.

Ultimately, no matter what supports are available to them, the student-athletes must seek out the help and put in the work for results, said Acompora. “They have to be the butterfly to my cocoon,” she said. “I can show them everything you need to transition, but they have to want it, too.” 

Seven years ago, Sam touched down in the United States, alone. Just 17, she had left her mother and siblings behind in West Africa to live with her father in New England, where he waited with her new green card.

But Sam’s arrival was one of the first and last parts of the move to go as planned. Her father became abusive, and after the pandemic descended, she moved in with a teacher who’d grown worried about her welfare. From then on, Sam’s education became both anchor and bridge to a better life.  

“I got that security from my teachers,” she said. 

College presented another respite from home, although it ended up coming with its own set of challenges, especially financial. From her first day on campus, Sam felt lost. She struggled to make friends in a dominant social culture that seemed to require an entrance fee she couldn’t pay. For her chronic health issues, she could barely afford transportation to appointments, let alone medical bills.  

Every year, Sam said, she wrote letters to the university administration explaining her financial shortcomings and appealing for leniency. The process started to feel dehumanizing, she said, as she found herself trying to prove “my story is sad enough to give me some aid.”

Yet she pushed on, often powered by a simple but effective refrain: “I don’t want to be poor.” Halfway through her first year, she caught a break when she was connected to the Wily Network, a non-profit based in the Boston area that provides holistic support to students navigating college without family assistance. The Wily Network helped Sam cover basic needs and went to bat for her before her last semester when it looked like she wouldn’t be able to make the final payment. 

Sam graduated this May, against all odds, and just in time to avoid some of the added fear students like her are experiencing, as the Trump Administration plans major changes to higher education and related social services. Months of speculation surrounding cuts to federal financial aid and public assistance, the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) resources, and the removal of immigrant and international students have left learners already at the greatest disadvantage haunted by the precarity of their situation. As the overwhelming uncertainty continues, it is these students who hang in the balance — those who rely on college for their safety and welfare and are one policy move away from losing it all. 

Keeping It Together

As the executive director of the Wily Network, Judi Alperin King, Ph.D., has had a front row seat to the host of new challenges her students have been managing in recent months.

The ground had always been shaky for those the Wily Network serves, Alperin King said, but at least they knew more or less what to expect. “Now that shaky ground is unpredictable.” 

“You cannot see the cracks in the foundation, and they just keep appearing,” Alperin King said. “Every day there’s a new crack, but it wasn’t in the place you thought it was going to be.”

Earlier this summer, one of Alperin King’s students flew across the country and drove deep into a rural territory, only to arrive and discover the internship that led him there had been cancelled. The work he’d been hired to assist was defunded amid the slew of cuts to federally funded programs, spanning climate and cancer research, foreign aid, and D.E.I. initiatives.

Other students had found out they lost their jobs before relocating for them, Alperin King said. This one hadn’t been so lucky.

With the student’s call alerting them to what happened, the Wily staff spurred to action, trying to figure out how exactly to get him to the airport from an area, apparently, without access to Ubers or even taxis. From there, he would need money for a ticket to Boston, a place to live when he got there, groceries to eat, and income to support himself until school started up in the fall. Without Wily on standby, he might have found himself stranded.

Some developments, like internship-ending cuts to programs and research, are affecting students in real time. Others simply loom, making everyone squirm. 

At any given time, top of mind for students assisted by the Wily Network is whether they’ll continue to be able to pay for college. Concerns have been churning around the fate of federal financial aid since Trump first began promoting the closure of the Department of Education and then signed an executive order to that effect in March 2025. 

Assurances from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that aid would continue didn’t assuage worries, especially as the initial version of Trump’s bill overhauling domestic policy included reductions to the maximum award for federal Pell Grants, which prop up more than six million students with the highest financial need.

This month, the bill that passed Congress and Trump signed into law didn’t include the Pell restrictions that had stoked the most fear, although there are other implications for financial aid. Among them are the elimination of Pell eligibility for students already receiving full scholarships from their institutions, as well as the expansion of Pell to cover shorter-term workforce training programs. In addition, the bill sets limits around the lifetime amount of federal aid students can receive for graduate school and winds down the number of loan repayment plans to two. 

Perhaps raising the most alarm are the law’s cuts to public assistance programs, namely Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. In 2020, an estimated 3.3 million students qualified for SNAP. But even if the changes don’t impact students directly, a trickle-down effect could. As states look to trim their budgets to fill the new gaps left in health care and food assistance, sector experts have warned higher education could take a hit that cuts back student support services or ramps up tuition costs.

The Trump bill’s changes to Medicaid and SNAP also involve denying eligibility to certain legal residents, including refugees and asylees. These restrictions come on the back of a larger crackdown on noncitizens in the United States.

From a higher education standpoint, these efforts have included the high-profile detention of international students, legally in the United States, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for their involvement in pro-Palestine advocacy on campus. The Trump Administration has also threatened to bar entry to international students who go to Harvard University as part of an ongoing power struggle with the Ivy League institution.

Any student originally from outside the United States or with family members from outside may be feeling vulnerable. Even Sam, armed with a green card upon arrival almost a decade ago, said she often can’t sleep at night from worrying about her status in the country. Learning about the recent detainment of an undocumented high school student by ICE in the town where she now lives didn’t make her feel better. 

“I think for me, I have always been scared,” she said. “I’m legal. I paid a lot of money to be here, but if you’ve never dealt with immigration before, it’s one hell of a beast.” 

“I think for me, I have always been scared.”

While policy confusion stirs up fear for high-needs students around their ability to stay on campus or in the country, the support services once designed to help them navigate this type of uncertainty are also taking a hit. 

Social worker Jamie Bennett, Ph.D., leads the Fostering Success Coaching Institute, which trains staff at groups like the Wily Network in best practices to assist high-needs students. Through her partnerships with these organizations, on and off college campuses, Bennett has gained first-hand insight into the kind of pressure they now find themselves under. At least two have undergone “mass layoffs,” Bennett said, due to funding cuts.

At a recent event Bennett hosted, free of charge and ironically focused on practitioner wellbeing, she guessed about 20 percent of those she had expected didn’t show. “Either they had lost their job or they were taking on responsibility from colleagues who were being laid off, so they couldn’t join,” she said.

For the most part, Bennett has been able to stave off any fallout for her work. But she imagines cutbacks for her partners could reduce her own services down the road. “That’s going to impact our ability to keep offering as many trainings as we do,” she said. “If they don’t have the funds to send their folks to professional development, they don’t come to us.” 

The Wily Network’s efforts have been affected, as well, as the flurry of cuts to university departments and resources leave even veteran advocates like Judi Alperin King unsure of how to help students. “In some ways, we’ve lost our power,” she said of her and her staff of “coaches.” With boundaries different from those of therapists and mentors, coaches take on wide-ranging tasks, from troubleshooting social problems and locating academic resources for students to acting as the emergency contact they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We knew what to do. Not every situation, but a lot of situations, they were predictable, and we could say, ‘Okay, here are the three steps you can take to support yourself through this,’” Alperin King said. Now those steps may no longer apply. 

Although neither Alperin King nor Bennett’s organizations receive federal funding, concerns have still emerged about whether they can completely evade government scrutiny. Both leaders have heard rumors that their group’s nonprofit status, which falls under the purview of the Internal Revenue Code, could be at risk should any of their activities draw higher concern, most likely in relation to the promotion of D.E.I.  

Those warnings haven’t stopped either from maintaining commitments to D.E.I., whether in spirit or explicitly on the company website and other materials. Bennett is firm on upholding her organization’s founding ideals. “We will say what we feel is just and what we feel is aligned with our values. Which are aligned on equity. They’re aligned on inclusion. They’re aligned on everybody’s voice matters.” 

While not overly concerned about her own job security, Bennett does worry about how that kind of stress, combined with increasing student needs, may affect the emotional wellbeing of other service providers. It’s critical, she said, for them to be “well and resourced and feel like they’re equipped to do their work, as they meet with students who have really complex situations and trauma.”

“If we start to see the support of them drop off, then it makes me nervous for what students will start to notice,” Bennett said.

At the Wily Network, one coach has begun to find her background in hospice care unsettlingly relevant to her current role supporting high-needs college students.

“You don’t really coach people at the end of life. You just sit with them, like, ‘Yep, death. Death is death,’” she said. Working with young people facing the unknown where their degree and future are concerned has started to feel like a similar experience.

“It’s more of an existential suffering,” she said.

The same coach has been struggling under the increasing weight of her students’ challenges. Guilt is a dominant emotion, stemming from the understanding she can distance herself from issues surfacing in higher education, from her job, in a way students can’t. 

“I feel like my empathic distress for students is harder to manage because, I mean, what’s going on is hard for me, but I feel like I have a home. I have a job. I have a lot of ‘knowns’ in my life that ballast against what’s going on,” she said. 

Student mental health has always been a prime concern for coaches, but now the uncertainty and fear fueled by real and perceived policy changes seem like the ultimate pile-on for young people already emotionally tested by years of striving and struggling. 

Alperin King knows her students are among the most resilient in higher education. She once used that fact to recruit new coaches, advertising the joys of championing talented students uniquely capable of battling through barriers — all the way to and through college.  

Students without family support who make it to college have a history of defying expectations. People like Alperin King and her colleagues are now asking, “Do we really need to raise the bar?” 

LearningWell used the pseudonym “Sam” and withheld other names in this article due to subjects’ privacy concerns.

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Despite some signs of post-pandemic recovery, the college mental health crisis remains alive and not-so-well.

Young people passionate about their own and their peers’ mental health continue to sound the alarm on college campuses, while institutions across the country devote their own staff, resources, and time towards interventions to the same end. 

But are the two groups missing something or, more specifically, each other in the process? 

The Coalition for Student Wellbeing, a new student-led mental health advocacy group, is founded on the premise that the most authentic and effective solutions to student mental health issues will come from ensuring those making the decisions hear from those affected by them. 

Unlike other student groups that focus on issues within their institutions, the Coalition unites members across colleges nationwide to address a broad range of mental health concerns. The goal is to ensure that the student voice is part of the policymaking process, whether on campus or in Washington.

“The college student experience is so unique and dependent on the person,” said Carson Domey, the founder and executive director of the Coalition. “We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”

“We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”

Domey has never been one to sit on the sidelines. A rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin, he started the Coalition in August 2024, having been active in youth mental health advocacy for years.

He entered the world of policymaking and politics well before he could vote. By 11, he had been carted back and forth to hundreds of doctor’s appointments for a rare form of Crohn’s disease and began pushing for legislation in Massachusetts to expand access to telemedicine.

When a close friend died from suicide three years later, the scope of Domey’s advocacy grew. Since high school, he has pursued state-level mental health changes, like adding the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline to student IDs and expanding the definition of physical education to include mental health. 

At U.T. Austin, Domey makes time to be not only a full-time student and director of the Coalition but the chair of the Texas State Policy Council at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. His combined advocacy efforts regularly shift him between the Massachusetts and Texas legislatures.

Domey called the Coalition’s mission “purposefully ambiguous.” The broad purpose is “to bridge the gap between students and decision-makers,” though he didn’t set parameters around the type of “decision makers” members should target, nor the specific actions they should take to reach them. 

He likened the group to a sort-of universal puzzle piece, ready to fit in wherever needed.  

Raising awareness around student perspectives on mental health is one key focus. Members utilize a variety of platforms, like Substack, to publish their ideas on concerns, from suicide prevention and basic needs support to combatting loneliness.

A new webinar series the group launched similarly promotes young voices, and also puts them in conversation with experts. In June, the first webinar centered on the importance of K-12 mental health education to set up students for success in college and beyond. The second, airing in August, will be a “town hall” for students to share their thoughts on “the state of higher education going into the fall semester,” Domey said. 

But being a piece of a larger “puzzle” also means finding ways to compliment the efforts of other existing organizations and individuals, hungry for a student-informed edge. 

One example of this kind of collaborative advocacy is the group’s fall 2024 visit to the White House to contribute to a roundtable discussion on suicide prevention. 

Then, this spring, the Coalition teamed up with Active Minds to produce a toolkit of resources to help students advocate for printing the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline on student ID cards — an extension of Domey’s work in Massachusetts. 

The response from those the Coalition hopes to influence has been promising, as many leaders embrace the importance of including students in mental health policymaking on campus.  

The group’s advisory board comprising top administrators and advocates, including President Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan and President Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith College, offers insights and expertise to help the students refine their advocacy efforts.

Gearan said he believes the student-inspired nature of the Coalition makes it both unique in the higher education space and valuable for administrators like himself. 

“It’s not that everyone can always agree with students, but the North Star is what is best for the student experience,” he said, adding that the diversity of the Coalition’s national membership is an added advantage.  

Domey has lost track, he said, of “the amount of times that I’ve just sat down with either a president, a provost, a dean of students, and really tried to get to know their role and their perspective more to make us a better organization.”

“We’re so much better for being able to have those resources,” he added. 

Domey expressed similar enthusiasm about the quality and connectedness of his student council. “There’s honestly a very small amount of students that I would say work on youth mental health nationally,” he said. “The pro is we’ve all gotten to really know each other, and it’s a really cool community of people spread throughout the country.”

While members may come from a range of backgrounds, they share a passion for mental health and, in many cases, impressive advocacy records.

Domey met Ela Gardiner, soon-to-be sophomore at Hobart, when they were both in high school in Massachusetts and already education advocates on the state stage. Gardiner had been elected one of her high school’s delegates to the Student Advisory Council of the Board of Education. 

She also struggled with anxiety and depression, an experience that spurred her mental health advocacy in the transition from high school.

When Gardiner discovered she could no longer see her Massachusetts-licensed therapist at college in New York, she dove into trying to adjust licensure policies and ensure students don’t lose crucial support at a vulnerable time. Along the way, she joined the Coalition. 

Shira Garg, a rising junior at the University of Georgia, connected with Domey and the Coalition through an internship involving research on college student mental health screening tools. Now, her pre-med focus not only grounds an interest in wellbeing but helps spearhead the Coalition’s assessment of gaps in the mental health space.

For the Coalition’s members, the collective dedication to mental health is a major motivator.

“All the students that are involved are so passionate about the topic, and I think that in itself kind of propels each one of us to want to do more and more and more,” Garg said. “When you surround yourself with peers that really want to make change, you also follow in their footsteps.”

The objective moving forwards is recruiting more members from new backgrounds and strengthening the foundation further, Domey said. 

“It all goes back to reflecting the stories of others and really trying to be that voice for as many people as you can.”

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

On April 8, 2025, the Trump Administration announced the end to $4 million in funding for research programs at Princeton University exploring risks associated with climate change. At the time, it was the latest instance in an ongoing wave of federal cuts to environmental initiatives. But this case sparked interest for another reason: According to the press release, at least one of the programs was eliminated because it was allegedly “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” 

Environmental experts were quick to denounce the idea that the solution to anxiety about climate change would come from avoiding research on the topic. But it’s not the first time the phrase “climate anxiety” has been summoned for political gain, on either side of the aisle. The truth is the term gets used to describe all variations of distress over the state of the Earth. Parsing out the possible interpretations is an important exercise for educators, practitioners, and students themselves. 

A 2024 study of “climate emotions” in 16- to 25-year-olds found that up to 85 percent are “worried” about climate change and its potential impact; and for around 38 percent, these worries negatively affect daily life. Concern over climate change has become so widespread among young people that it’s affecting how they vote, whom they choose to work for, what products they buy, even their decision to have children. But are young people’s responses to climate change a clinical issue to be treated? Or do they fall in line with those to most social problems, just with a catchier, more damning name?

The framing of “climate anxiety” presents something disordered in need of a cure, but from a clinical perspective, there is a distinction between an anxiety disorder and experiencing some sense of anxiety. After all, the vast majority of young people may feel worried about climate change; the majority don’t have an anxiety disorder.

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated,” said Kaitlin Gallo, a Boston-based psychologist whose practice focuses on young adults and college students. She said she’s encountered a spectrum of concerns when it comes to climate change. Even among her patients who tend to have clinical-grade issues, their climate concerns do not necessarily map onto an anxiety disorder. “Oftentimes, the worry is occurring outside of the context of an anxiety disorder, and it’s just what I might call sort of a normal or understandable worry given the state of the world,” she said. 

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated.”

It’s when the worry becomes “hard to control or to move on from” that it could begin to signal a deeper anxiety disorder demanding a more clinical response, Gallo said. Even then, the end goal may not be to try to get rid of the concerns.

“I think sometimes when worries are realistic, then there’s just a different way to deal with them,” she said. “Sometimes it might not be reasonable or helpful to change the thought, but rather to think about how you want to live your life in the face of that concern.”

People who experience an anxiety disorder are certainly susceptible to dark fears about a fiery end. For others, particularly young people who have more time on the earth, climate distress, even fear, may be an unavoidable part of living. 

Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old living in New York, said dismissals of climate change are what really makes her crazy.  

“To watch business as usual go on around you with very little recognition of how distressing the state of the planet is can be really confusing. Because you’re like, ‘Am I insane?’” she said. “This feels like a problem that we should be moving to solve with World War II urgency. Everything needs to be mobilized to prevent catastrophe.”

When she first started experiencing more acute distress about the state of the climate and its future, Ferraro was surprised at the lack of sympathy she met from family and friends, especially those she expected to understand. If anyone had asked them, she knew they would say they cared about the environment.

Realizing her regular network might not be able to give her support she needed, she started exploring other options. She was especially interested in talking to people her age, given climate change, she said, “is a threat felt uniquely the younger that you are.”

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I’m freaked out because I don’t know if I’m going to have a child anymore,’ or ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen. How can I think about my life when I’m 50 where I can’t get water from the tap?’” Ferraro said.

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen.'”

The support group she ended up finding was one she had to help create. Eager for an in-person space in New York, she started hosting “climate cafes,” or listening circles that bring together people with environmental concerns to share how they’re feeling. 

A grassroots initiative, climate cafes have popped up with chapters nation-wide. Ferraro said they can offer relief from advocacy-related burnout or help someone who doesn’t even identify as an “environmentalist” learn about new ways to contribute to the cause. On the website for Climate Cafe NYC, the branch refers to itself as “the social home of NYC climate action.”

“A lot of it is holding hands with people as they kind of walk into that unknown, knowing that you’re doing it together and that there are other people who are experiencing this,” Ferraro said. 

Part of the purpose is helping each other avoid hopelessness. “We can be sad, but to be despaired is a totally other feeling. That’s when you’ve given up,” Ferraro said. “We want to help people avoid despair and avoid nihilism and really, even though it’s very hard work, stay openhearted and willing to connect with people and understand how we can work together.” 

The need for these kinds of outlets is evident in the many students who are bringing their climate-related concerns to school with them. Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray said the emergence of this distress in her classes pushed her down a path towards a new expertise: emotions and the environment. Now she’s chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.

As recently as a decade ago, Ray said environmentalists were trying to ramp up concerns about climate change, with what she calls the “scare-to-care” approach. Opening young people’s eyes to the devastation that could come, the thinking went, would inspire them to act, before it was too late.

The strategy may have worked, but too well. Ray said she saw students becoming more enthusiastic about climate-related issues, but they also seemed more despairing. “I was noticing my students were not coping very well with the material,” she said. “I didn’t think my teaching was changing, but something was changing about the students.”

Up to that point, Ray had felt like her students were taking the issues in stride, embracing problem solving. With time, she said, “It felt more like an existential crisis for them.” She decided part of the problem was that students were learning a lot about what was going wrong and a lot less about how to manage their own response to the problems. “They weren’t learning all that stuff alongside coping skills or emotional intelligence or any kind of cultural frame as to why these things might be getting worse,” she said.

She set out to fill the gap. Research into the spiritual and therapeutic tools activists have used in other social movements became the basis of an understanding about how to deal with climate concerns. This mental health-forward approach to environmental issues also appears in her book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.”

Still, Ray continues to wait for the day when higher education institutions have integrated trauma-informed instruction and emotional intelligence into environmental education. That component “is just beginning to percolate on the edges of the tipping point,” she said. 

William Throop, professor emeritus and former provost at Green Mountain College, is also interested in activating a more personal dimension of environmental studies. For the philosopher-by-training, with a background teaching environmental ethics, it’s important to not only present possible climate change solutions to students but equip them with the life skills to enact them. This is an approach he views as part of “character education,” which he said prioritizes “the student as a person, not just as a collector of information.”

By learning what he calls “skillful habits,” Throop said, students stand to become “better critical thinkers, better ethical thinkers and actors.” In his book, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change,” he discusses a set of “hope skills” particularly helpful for confronting climate issues.

“Hope communication,” for example, is a skill Throop suggests could be particularly pertinent for tackling climate change. “How do you describe in a clear way the facts of a situation which are problematic and yet don’t turn people off?” he said. “How do you motivate people who address those facts in the way you communicate about them?”

Teaching hope, Throop said, might sound “like something a psychologist ought to do.” He thinks otherwise. “It’s something that should be embedded in curricula addressing these issues.”

As some faculty become more in tune with how students react to learning about climate change, students continue to turn towards each other to process the emotions they are experiencing. 

Eva Salmon, a rising junior at Barnard College, said she doesn’t usually struggle with anxiety in other facets of life; yet concerns about the climate are a constantly “simmering undertone” in the back of her mind. “In general, seeing everything happening in the world, it feels like my heart is constantly breaking, and I’m constantly experiencing a sense of betrayal.”

“Anytime it’s relevant, I can feel the grief. I can feel the anxiety. It really is there,” she said.

Compounding these emotions for students is the sense that their institutions are leaving them to lead the way alone. That’s the consensus among many members of Sunrise Columbia, the Columbia University branch of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate activism effort. 

Because it’s independent from the university, Sunrise Columbia can hold the administration’s feet to the fire in ways a club receiving school funding can’t. The student-run group conducts its own investigations into the university’s use of funds from fossil fuel companies to fund climate research. 

“Complicit Columbia” is the 53-page report the students published on their findings that the university accepted at least $43.7 million from fossil fuel companies between 2005 to 2024. More than a third of the funds benefitted the university’s research hub, the Center on Global Energy Policy.

Salmon, one of the student authors of the paper, said she takes issue with the fact that students, rather than university personnel, were the ones to take on this initiative. “The university needs to be more attuned and aware and doing its own research into these things. But for now, this is what we have,” she said.

The group of friends Salmon collaborates with has been key to keeping her motivated despite her frustrations. In general, she said she believes “a lot of the bad that’s happening in the world” is the result of “not prioritizing community” and disconnect among people. It’s a problem she feels grateful not to have. 

“To have found community and the space in the way that I have really has brought me a lot of peace and joy,” she said. The sense of support pushes her activism to the next level. “I think I would’ve done it regardless, but I don’t think I would’ve felt quite as empowered and impassioned.”

“At the end of the day, even if all this is happening around us, we have each other. And that feels like a very powerful, powerful thing,” she added.

Salmon’s overriding objective is to stay positive, to concentrate on the friends that are supporting her and the work they do together that bring her relief. “I really try and focus on recognizing the beauty in every step I take or recognizing things I like around me and just expressing gratitude for that,” she said. 

Olivia Ferraro, the climate cafe host, has adopted a similar outlook. While “climate anxiety” may be more apparent in her life than it was a few years ago, that discomfort has fed a deeper appreciation for the time she has left and a desire to make the most of it. It’s a guiding force that has changed her approach to relationships and decision-making.

“It’s been really freeing, honestly,” she said. “I like my life a lot more now than I ever did before.”

For 20 years, the Louisiana Center Addressing Substance Use (LaCASU) had been making strides in its work supporting state colleges and universities struggling with drug and alcohol prevention efforts. By all accounts, LaCASU’s research, training, and data collection made strong contributions to treatment and recovery at Louisiana State University and beyond. But gaining real traction, not to mention funding, required the power and gravitas of merging with an official state government body.

“My emails went over a little bit different coming from a board of regents email address,” Dr. Allison Smith, former associate director at LaCASU, half-joked to a crowd in Baltimore, Md. on April 23. She was participating in a panel discussion at the conference, “Building Resilience and Success: State and System-Level Mental Health Innovations,” hosted by SHEEO (State Higher Education Executive Officers Association) and The Jed Foundation.

In an age when federal funding is uncertain, campus leaders are looking for novel sources of state-based support for student mental health. The conference in Baltimore highlighted a number of ideas, options, and success stories. A new resource guide, “Engaging State Policymakers to Support College Student Mental Health,” presented by the American Council on Education (ACE), offers more to take home. 

“It was sort of like, well, in the current administration, where does it make sense to direct our energy?” said Hollie Chessman, director and principal program officer at ACE. “How do we continue to move the needle on mental health on our nation’s campuses?” The answer, she found, was rooted in pulling the right (state) policy levers.

“In the current administration, where does it make sense to direct our energy? How do we continue to move the needle on mental health on our nation’s campuses?”

While data suggests small improvements trending in some aspects of mental health in college students, anxiety and depression remain rampant. The 2024 Healthy Minds Study reported depression and anxiety symptoms had decreased three and two points, respectively, compared to the previous year. Yet 38 percent of students still reported struggling with depression, and 34 percent with anxiety.

The scale of the issue, which escalated year-over-year from 2007 to 2022, has drawn concern from both sides of the political aisle. Several bills promoting mental health interventions on college campuses, and at all education levels, have received bipartisan support in recent years. In 2022, the aptly titled Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, including initiatives targeting the reduction of gun violence, passed with $1 billion earmarked for school mental health services. In April, the Trump administration canceled this funding. 

Chessman and her colleagues at ACE had been worried about this kind of fallout for student mental health programs. In 2024, they were spearheading a $13.8 billion bill to back research, training, and other services at universities. This year, they refocused their attention on other projects, including a toolkit to illustrate a pragmatic route towards a solution. 

Coalescing with peers provided the path forward. Talks with a mental health coalition of leaders in the field, such as the American Psychological Association, Active Minds, and the Healthy Minds Network, revealed a gap ACE might fill: The experts were anticipating a pivot towards state-level advocacy, but needed direction on how to go about it. “From that conversation,” said Ngan Nguyen, ACE government relations associate, “we started to think about drafting a toolkit.” Nguyen and her co-associate Alexander Cassell became the lead authors.

The final guide features four main parts. First comes an emphasis on data collection to specify campus needs, with links to surveys for assessing mental health and a Return on Investment Calculator for College Mental Health Services and Programs. Then, the toolkit outlines a series of talking points. The first point covers the prevalence of mental health issues and their implications for college attrition and basic needs insecurity. Others home in on the interventions state funding in particular can promote, and the benefits of telehealth. The third and longest section delves into examples of work other institutions have done in partnership with states to advance mental health. The fourth lays out a final host of resources, including other organizations and assessment tools, to further university advocacy efforts. 

One of the main goals, and challenges, of designing the toolkit was ensuring relevance across states and for a range of professionals and institutions, Nguyen said. She thought about whether the strategies would be helpful for campuses in a variety of political climates; for those just launching advocacy efforts and others far along in the process; for university higher-ups, as well as general staff and students. The tools needed to be easy to customize.

 “The toolkit gives folks a really solid foundation, and then [they can do] whatever makes sense for them,” Chessman said. She added that not just the process but the end result might look different depending on the school or the state. “Maybe the climate in their state has the opportunity to ask for money. But it doesn’t have to be for money.”

Gathering data on return on investment for mental health initiatives struck Nguyen as one of the most crucial and broadly relevant recommendations. Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at SHEEO, agreed. (Harnisch also serves on the LearningWell editorial board.) “Investments in student mental health are important, but they’re going to be in a competitive environment, with a range of other items, vying for a limited pool of available state funding,” he said. “The focus on return on investment and student success is critical.”

Harnisch also highlighted the toolkit’s section listing examples of successful state mental health policymaking. “Policies to expand access to student mental health services. Growing the pipeline of mental health professionals. Boosting state funding. Addressing basic needs insecurity,” he recounted with enthusiasm. “There are so many ways that states can make a difference.”