College Student Mental Health: Exploring Depression, Anxiety, and Mindsets in First-Year STEM Students

In this work we show the psychological well-being of first-year students taking a chemistry course, focusing on the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as potentially problematic personal and comparative mindsets, which may lay the groundwork for future investigations of mental health within this population. Data was collected through surveys and in-class worksheets administered during the Spring semesters of 2022 and 2023 in large lecture chemistry courses. Analysis revealed high rates of depression and anxiety among participants, with 49.3% of students experiencing moderate to severe depression symptoms and 56.6% experiencing moderate to severe anxiety symptoms. These numbers are about 20% higher than recently reported values for mixed undergraduate student populations in the United States. Data relating to maladaptive perfectionism shows that 99.3% of students are holding themselves to a high personal standard, while 74.1% of students have a negative self-perception relative to reality. Most students (>70%) scored in the moderate to severe range for seven out of eight mindsets studied, highlighting the widespread prevalence of negative mindsets among first-year STEM students. Correlation analyses highlighted significant relationships between maladaptive perfectionism and both depression (r = 0.67) and anxiety symptoms (r = 0.63). Additionally, strong correlations were found between performance as identity scores and anxiety symptoms (r = 0.60). These findings underscore the urgent need for targeted interventions to address negative mindsets and enhance student mental health in higher education settings, particularly in chemistry classrooms.