Why are female undergraduates so much more likely to suffer from psychological distress than male students?

9-1-2010

Why are female undergraduates so much more likely to suffer from psychological distress than male students?

During their first year of university, what is it that predicts which students will sink or swim? A recent study of French first years found that 16% of the men and 33% of the women suffered psychological distress (anxiety or depression) by the year's end. For the women, but not the men, good social support protected against it. It's possible that men are more comfortable not sharing what may be just as often lives of quiet desperation.

For while women nearly always come out in surveys as being twice as distressed as men at all ages, men are usually twice as likely to be abusing substances. Distressed female students talk to friends. Distressed male students drink and take drugs, then probably feel equally miserable in the college bar or pub as they yell at each other about the best football team or the merits of TS Eliot's poetry versus Lou Reed's lyrics.

If a student (of either sex) had suffered an adverse life event, such as the death of an intimate or parental separation, they were two and half times more likely to be distressed. Difficulties in adjusting to the greater requirement to be autonomous and a "self-starter" were also significant.

This suggests that if your child is not very self-motivated in the academic sphere, they will find it stressful. In accord with this, having a sense of mastery had a protective effect for both sexes. If you believe that your destiny is in your own hands rather than fatalistically determined, then you are less likely to go under.

The authors were surprised to find that class background did not affect distress. However, although people from lower social classes in the population as a whole are twice as likely to be mentally ill as those from high ones, evidence in the last 10 years shows that this does not apply to teenagers and students. The greater wealth and opportunities of the young actually translate into significantly higher rates of mental illness, a fact that no one seems to want to think about. It rather calls into question the consensus assumption that affluence and university degrees should be everyone's main goal in life.

For parents with high ambitions for their daughters, there are useful clues for maximising results in the literature on student distress. A study of Cambridge women undergraduates found that ones with high levels of neurotic personality (prone to worry but not clinically depressed) were four times more likely to get a first than ones with average levels. However, if the worry tipped over into severe distress, they were 10 times less likely to get a first: there's a delicate balance between levels of angst and academic success.

Interestingly, the French study found that by far the most distressed undergraduates were female medical students. The extra work and pressure to compete upsets them, but not their male peers. No one knows why.

All in all, just as parents in the "higher" classes should worry like hell about their 15-year-old daughters (43% of whom are distressed, compared with 24% of higher-class boys), they should also be worrying about their student daughters. While it may be that sons' relative lack of application is increasingly likely to show up in poorer career opportunities post-university, it's the mental health of daughters that needs the more careful watching while they are still being educated.

French study: Verger, P et al, 2009, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 44, 643-50.

More Oliver James, at selfishcapitalist.com (Guardian)