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Rayhan Nazir

Professor Cassel

Research Proposal

23 June 2019

Students and Mental Health

Over the course of my life I have dealt with my own struggles with mental health. I

currently am dealing with anxiety disorder. Looking back, I feel that school and the various

extracurriculars that I have participated in have been a major source. This past junior years has

been the hardest year of my life by far due to the intense workload and stress that I had to deal

with. I found myself in a really dark place where I thought and felt things that I or anyone else

should never have to experience. That is one of the main reasons I am choosing to research this

topic. I want to know how school and these extracurriculars are affecting other students around

the world.

I have strong feelings on this topic as I have personally experienced issues with mental

health. My main motivation for researching this is so that I can have a full understanding of the

struggles others are dealing with and how much of a problem it truly is. Right now, not having

done a lot of research on the topic, I feel that this is an important issue to talk about. I definitely

think that there is an argument to be made that school is negatively affecting some students and

causing issues with mental health. In my opinion I think that schools right now are inducing way

too much stress and competition that many students struggle to deal with. There is way too much

pressure and work that is put upon students in school that I believe people should never have to
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deal with. My school has around 4000 people which causes competition to be highly rampant

within the school. People including me are constantly comparing ourselves to others to determine

whether we are good enough. Right now, the only information I know on the topic are based on

my life and some stories here and there that I have read about. I also have some friends that I

have gone through some mental health issues and I have told me that school to them has been a

source of it.

With this I want to look more into other stories and research done on mental health in

connection to school. I want to learn if this is truly an issue that many others are dealing with. To

start I want to find answers to some of my first few questions. For example, How do students feel

about the workload that school provides? Another question would be, What are the statistics of

mental diseases that develop in people during their adolescent years.