By Adam Sternbergh | The Week
Professor Laurie Santos didn’t set out to create the most popular course in the history of Yale University and the most talked-aboutcollege course in America. She just wanted her students to be happy. And they certainly look happy as they file into a church — a literal church, Battell Chapel, that’s been converted to a lecture hall — on the Yale campus on a sunny April afternoon, lugging backpacks and chatting before taking their seats in the pews. They’ve just returned from a two-week spring break. The weather outside is gorgeous. Professor Santos is playing her pre-class get-pumped playlist, featuring the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” And, let’s not forget, all of these students are currently going to Yale. What’s not to be happy about?
Quite a bit, it turns out. The very fact that Santos’ new course, Psych 157: Psychology and the Good Life, is so wildly popular, with over 1,200 enrolled students, suggests that she’s onto something when she tells me one day, pre-lecture, “College students are much more overwhelmed, much more stressed, much more anxious, and much more depressed than they’ve ever been. I think we really have a crisis writ large at colleges in how students are doing in terms of self-care and mental health.” Then she adds, “Sadly, I don’t think it’s just in colleges.”
Santos is right. College students aren’t happy. According to a recent survey by the American College Health Association, 52 percent of students reported feeling hopeless, while 39 percent suffered from such severe depression that they had found it difficult to function at some point during the previous year.
