should i write my college essay about depression

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Should you discuss mental health issues in your college essay?

by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 20, 2018 | Blog , College Essays | 6 comments

Image ©Nickshot, Adobe Stock

Note, January 2022: This post was written in 2018, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Obviously, many things have changed since then, not least the amount of psychological pressure that many high school students have experienced. Clearly, some of the boundaries and expectations surrounding acceptable/advisable topics for admissions essays have shifted, and applicants undoubtedly have more leeway in discussing mental-health issues than they did in the past. That said, I would still caution against making this subject the exclusive focus of your essay(s). If it happens to be relevant—and it very well might be, given the events of the last couple of years— then you should focus on discussing it in a mature way that conveys qualities such as empathy and resilience, and that demonstrates your ability to reflect insightfully on what may have been very difficult situations.

As regular readers of my blog may know, I periodically trawl the forums over at College Confidential to see what’s trending. Recently, I’ve noticed a concerning uptick in the number of students asking whether it’s appropriate for them to write about mental health issues, most frequently ADD and/or anxiety, in their college applications.

So the short answer: don’t do it.

The slightly longer version:

If you’re concerned about a drop in grades or an inconsistent transcript, talk to your guidance counselor. If these types of issues are addressed, the GC’s letter is the most appropriate place for them. If, for any reason, the GC is unable/unwilling to discuss them and the issues had a significant impact on your performance in school that unequivocally requires explanation, you can put a brief, matter of fact note in the “is there any additional information you’d like us to know?” section, but think very carefully about how you present it. Do not write your main essay about the issue.

The full version:

To understand why these topics should generally be avoided, you need to understand what information colleges are actually seeking to gain from the personal statement. Although it is technically a personal narrative, it is, in a sense, also a persuasive essay: its purpose is to convey what sets you apart from the thousands of others with equally good grades and scores, and to suggest whether you have qualities that make you more likely to thrive at university x than the other 10 or 15 or even 20 applicants clamoring for that spot.

Now, whether such thing can actually be determined from 650 words (with which some students receive significant help) is of course questionable; however, the bottom line is that, adcoms are looking for students who will be successful in college. Discussing one’s inability to focus or intense aversion to social situations does not exactly inspire confidence, even if a student insists those problems have been overcome. Leaving home, dealing with professors and roommates and more challenging classes… Those are all major stressors. There is a tacit understanding that of course some students will flame out, have breakdowns, etc., but adcoms are understandably hesitant to admit anyone who is already at a higher risk for those issues. You want them to be excited about the prospect of admitting you, not debate whether you’ll really be able to handle college. (In fact, I had multiple students with various issues who were not truly ready for college and who did flame out — colleges have good reason to take these things seriously.)

This concern goes beyond any particular student’s well-being: graduation rates get factored into rankings, and every student who doesn’t make it through drags that statistic just a little bit lower. If a student does develop serious problems while on campus, there are also potential legal/liability issues involved, and no school wants to deliberately court those.

Besides, if your grades are iffy, it is extremely difficult not to sound as if you are making excuses. You are much better off talking about an experience or interest that will make them look past the transcript and think, “Hey, I really like this kid.” And the reality is that if your grades are that iffy, you’re probably not a competitive candidate at super-selective colleges anyway. These schools are looking for applicants who are on the way to fulfilling their potential, not for ones who need to explain away chronic underachievement.

In addition, one thing applicants — and sometimes their parents — have difficulty wrapping their heads around is the sheer number of applications the average admissions officer has encountered. Situations that may seem extreme and dramatic to adolescents who have recently confronted them may in fact have already been experienced — and written about — by thousands of other applicants. A 17-year old may believe that describing their anxiety in morbid detail will make them seem complex and introspective, but more likely it will only come off as overwrought and trite.

I know that might sound harsh, but please remember that admissions officers are coming at this process with no pre-existing knowledge of you as a person, only a few minutes to spend on your essay, and hundreds of other applications to get through. They are also under intense pressure to ensure that the appropriate demographics targets are being met and all the various institutional constituencies (coaches, development office, orchestra conductor) are being satisfied. They’re not ogres, and they’ll try to give you the benefit of the doubt, but if yours is the fifth essay about overcoming anxiety they’ve seen in the last 48 hours, they will look at it and reflexively think, “oh, another one of these.” That is not a first impression you want to make.

Now, are there exceptions? Yes, of course, but they are rare. In all the time I did college admissions work, I had exactly one student successfully discuss anxiety in an essay. It was, however, introduced in the context of a family tragedy that had profoundly shaped the student’s life; given that background, the discussion seemed natural and matter of fact rather than overdramatized. Even so, I made the student take a good week to think about whether that topic was truly the one they wanted to write about.

Ultimately, of course, the decision is yours, and the choice depends on the larger story you want to tell as well as your ability as a writer, but these topics are so difficult to pull off well that you are best off avoiding them if you can (particularly if you don’t have access to someone with a lot of admissions experience who can review your essay). Find another topic/ experience that you enjoy writing about (and that others are likely to enjoy reading about); that presents you as someone interesting and thoughtful; and that suggest you are ready to thrive in college.

If you really are concerned about your ability to function in college, most schools have plenty of resources for you to take advantage of (academic support, counseling center, etc.). But those are things to investigate after you get admitted. Before that, don’t go out of your way to fly red flags where none are warranted.

Why is Dyslexia ok to mention on an essay, but overcoming selective mutism is not?

Dyslexia is a learning disability that lends itself to proof that it has been overcome through excellent scores in reading and writing. It’s not easy to overcome or cope with dyslexia so an essay showing how a student did it demonstrates their tenacity and resourcefulness. Grades and scores are proof that the dyslexia will not be a problem in college, while the essay can highlight the characteristics that led to the student’s success and which will serve them well in college.

I wrote about how my dog helped me overcome me ending my life/depression and moving to another school is that too common

Thanks for the tips and perspective. It seems like common sense to me as a parent and tutor, but now I have an “established author” to cite!

I want to write about how depression had change me. But my grades and statistics are all great. Is this okay to write? My bad mental health somehow didn’t manage to get to the others parts of my life.

Is it okay to write about how despite psychosis I could manage to get good grades?

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Should You Talk About Mental Health in College Essays?

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Shravya Kakulamarri in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

What are you required to disclose in your application.

Should You Include Mental Health History in Your Application?

How to Talk about Mental Health in College Applications

Taking care of your health in college.

Many students wonder if they should discuss mental health or disability in their college applications. Mental health history or a disability might be an integral part of who a student is, but that doesn’t necessarily make it relevant to a college application. Keep in mind that it is actually illegal for colleges to ask for these types of details about your life because it can be considered discrimination. So, colleges will never directly ask if you’ve had any sort of mental health issue or if you’ve ever had a disability. Based on this reason alone, you are not required to disclose mental or physical health concerns on your application.

Disclosing your mental or physical health is strictly a matter of personal choice. If you leave out this information, it is not lying and 100% within your legal right to do so.

Should You Include Mental Health History in Your Application?

Before you choose whether to disclose your history of mental health or disability, you should think about the purpose of a college application. Everything that you put in your college application should contribute to an overall positive image of who you are as a student and member of the community.

You usually don’t want to hide integral parts of who you are, but you also don’t want to be sharing challenges that are not going to strengthen your application. This is true not only for mental health or disabilities but also for academics, extracurriculars, and other experiences. Normally, students don’t bring up the time that they got a C or D in a class on their application. Everything that you include on your application should paint the most positive image of you possible. You always want to put your best foot forward and keep the focus on your strengths.

You don’t want colleges to doubt your ability to succeed and perform well under pressure. If you mention any mental health concerns, they might use that as a way to question if you will do well at their school and be able to handle their rigorous course load. While colleges are supportive of their students’ mental health challenges and provide resources and services, you don’t want their first impression of you on your application to be something that makes them uncertain of your abilities. So, keep this in mind when deciding whether to disclose your mental health history.

If you decide to include your mental health or disability history in your application , there are specific aspects of your experience that you should focus on. Rather than talking about the mental illness itself, focus more on the recovery and management aspects and what you have learned from the experience.

Discuss things like how you have grown and the coping methods that you have cultivated due to the experience. These will give the admissions officer an idea of the types of strategies that you’ll likely use in college anytime that you encounter a stressful situation.

Overall, if you choose to talk about mental health in your applications, focus on the learning and growth that you’ve gained because of it.

Mental health is an important part of your well-being, and it’s essential to start good habits in high school . This way, you’ll be better prepared to cope when you face new challenges in college. You’ll likely be experiencing living on your own for the first time and have new responsibilities without the same support system that you had at home. It’s crucial to learn how to take care of your mental health early.

Fortunately, most students will have many resources at college to help them through mental health challenges. If you’re dealing with any mental health struggles, there is usually an office of wellness where you can schedule a time to see a therapist. This is usually provided with your school’s health insurance. If this is something that you are concerned about for your college experience, make sure to look into what mental health resources each college provides before applying.

Should I Mention Depression on My College Application?

Colleges scrutinize applications from troubled students more closely.

Should I Put Depression on My College Apps?

Phil Bliss | TheiSpot.com for USN&WR

Growing up in New York City, Emily Isaac studied Hebrew, performed in school musicals, and played soccer. She fantasized about going to a prestigious university like Harvard and becoming a lawyer for Hollywood celebrities. But her drive and ambition faded when she reached high school. She ignored homework assignments and argued with teachers. Her grades dropped to mostly C's and D's. She was so difficult that she was asked to leave three private schools in two years. Emily says she was angry and depressed over a family member's drug use. At age 17 last fall, she was applying to colleges and had a tough decision to make: How to present herself to admissions officers increasingly wary of troubled students?

Concerned about liability and campus safety in the wake of shootings at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech, more colleges and universities are scrutinizing the character of applicants. They want to know about students' past behavior, and, if there is any doubt, they will call high school counselors for answers. Admissions officers say "youthful indiscretions" like a schoolyard brawl or an unpaid traffic ticket aren't likely to result in denial letters. But a pattern of troubling behavior could cost someone an admission.

"We're not only admitting students for intellectual reasons but for community reasons," says Debra Shaver, director of admissions at Smith College, a private women's liberal arts school in Massachusetts. "We want to make sure they will be good community members." Smith and other schools acknowledge that making judgments about character is sometimes a messy process. It doesn't involve precise measures like SAT scores or grade-point average. "In some cases, you say, 'This makes me nervous,' and maybe it is an intuition and some reasonable people would disagree, but it goes with the territory," says Bruce Poch, dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

Full disclosure. It's not surprising, then, that students like Emily agonize over the decision to disclose personal and academic problems. "We finally hired an independent counselor," says Lisa Kaufman, Emily's mother.

Not all counselors agree on what advice to give families. Some discourage students from bringing up mental illnesses and emotional problems altogether. Others say full disclosure helps when a student's records show poor grades or other inconsistencies that are likely to make colleges suspicious. Shirley Bloomquist, an independent college counselor in Great Falls, Va., says she once called a liberal arts college in Massachusetts to say she was disappointed by its decision to reject an applicant who had written about overcoming a drug addiction. The student had completed a drug rehabilitation program and had been clean for a year. "Colleges are more concerned than ever about student emotional stability," Bloomquist says. "I think it is imperative that the student, the parent, and the high school counselor discuss the situation and decide what should or should not be revealed."

Sally Rubenstone, senior counselor with CollegeConfidential.com and coauthor of Panicked Parents' Guide to College Admission, says being forthright about past behavior or mental health problems doesn't mean "The Jerry Springerization of the College Admissions Essay." "Sometimes I have to implore [students] to stay mum," she says. "There are clearly times when personal problems are too personal—or inappropriate—to include in a college essay."

Emily's problems, however, needed airing—but not all of them. For example, she didn't disclose her troubles in middle school because colleges asked only (via the Common Application) about academic and behavioral misconduct in high school. She says she was asked to leave one high school after a confrontation with another student, but the offense was never recorded in her file, so she didn't volunteer that information either. On the advice of her counselor, Emily wrote cover letters and an essay focusing instead on the reasons for her documented troubles in school and how she had grown from those experiences.

Although colleges would know from her transcripts that she had been at a boarding school for troubled teens, Emily didn't explicitly mention depression in her essay. Rubenstone, who served as Emily's counselor in the admissions process, says, "Colleges can run scared when they hear the word depression. " Emily, who got treatment, hoped colleges would pay attention to her improvement instead. "I thought I was taking a risk, but I had faith that people would understand," she says. In one of her cover letters, Emily wrote: "What I am trying to say is that my past no longer dictates my future and that I am a far more capable, hard-working, mature student than depicted in my forms."

Colleges cannot legally deny admission specifically on the basis of mental illness, but it's hard to account for how that characteristic figures into the calculus of who gets in and who doesn't. Admissions officers undoubtedly are aware that the shooters at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois had troubled histories before they applied to school: Indeed, the graduate student responsible for the NIU attack had written about his emotional struggles in adolescence in his admission application. Admissions officers, ever mindful of the diversity on campus, also are aware that reports of depressed college students are on the rise.

Not all colleges offer students a second chance. One high school senior in Tucson, Ariz., with an impressive academic record was rejected by a selective liberal arts college after his counselor says he told the school that the student had been disciplined for smoking marijuana on a field trip. The counselor says he helped the student with his essay, believing that if it struck the right tone and offered a sincere apology and a pledge from the student that he would not make the same mistake again, the essay would persuade the college to admit him. It didn't. "This particular school was trying very hard to diminish its reputation as being 'kind of tolerant of druggies'—the very words used by the college representative," the counselor says.

Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers says too much pressure is being put on college admission officers who lack the expertise to evaluate the seriousness of an offense or an applicant's emotional well-being. In the absence of clear guidelines, Nassirian says, colleges should stop asking about past behavior altogether. "It's very tempting for colleges to say we're excluding the next Jack the Ripper from sitting next to your son or daughter," he says. "But it's really your son or daughter who is getting nabbed and getting nabbed for having done something stupid in high school."

Common Application. That may be the reason that many high schools don't disclose information about a student's disciplinary history. A recent survey of 2,306 public and private high schools found that only 23 percent of schools said they allowed for the disclosure of such information to colleges, 39 percent said they disclose sometimes, and 38 percent said they never do. The results refer to questions asked by about 340 colleges that use the Common Application, which inquires if students have ever been convicted of a crime or been severely disciplined in high school. This year, 347,837 high school students used the Common Application. Of those, only 2 percent said they had a serious discipline problem in high school, and 0.22 percent said they were convicted of a misdemeanor or felony.

It's not clear how many students refuse to answer the questions or conceal their past troubles. In what one admissions counselor sees as a separate, disturbing trend, high schools that once suspended or expelled students for offenses such as academic dishonesty now strike deals with parents and students that result in less severe consequences and no record of the student's indiscretion. One New York student who has been accepted to several competitive schools says he caught a lucky break when the private high school he attended his freshman year decided that rather than expel him, it would let him quietly transfer to another school after he was caught stealing a biology exam. The school told him it would not notify colleges about the incident. At his new high school, the student was suspended for insulting another student. And again he was able to cut a deal with the principal at that school. The student, who requested anonymity, says he was able to "work off" the suspension from his record by performing community service. He says his guidance counselor discouraged him from bringing up either incident on his college applications. "It's not that I wanted to lie," he says. "I just didn't want to lose everything that I've worked so hard for."

If an applicant's school records raise suspicion, colleges say they will make every effort to verify the information. Some, for instance, will turn to Google, Facebook, or another source on the Internet. But it's not clear how thorough most colleges are when high schools don't cooperate. It is often the case, some say, that an anonymous tipster or an upset parent of a child who was not admitted to the school will come forward. Colleges say a high school's refusal to share information could damage the school's relationship with the college, especially in the event that the applicant is admitted and later commits a crime.

Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions at Harvard, says high schools that knowingly withhold troubling information about applicants will be held responsible. "We're not a detective agency," she says. "We operate on the assumption that schools are behaving honorably." If administrators learn that an applicant has lied, colleges can rescind offers of admission. That's what happened in 1995 when Harvard administrators found out that an admitted applicant had killed her mother when she was 14. The applicant, a straight-A student, had not disclosed the incident in her Harvard application on the advice of her lawyer.

Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Grinnell College, a liberal arts school in Iowa, says colleges expect that students will answer questions about their past behavior truthfully and completely. "We want to understand if you slipped up why it happened," he says. "If we understand that there is a death in the family or a personal crisis that would help us say, 'This is not a normal pattern of behavior,' we can forgive you." Sometimes, he adds, an honest and thoughtful response can make a candidate more appealing.

Earlier this year, Emily was offered admission to six schools; she has decided to attend Simmons College in Boston. She was turned down by four other schools. "I'm grateful because I feel people are willing to take a chance on me," she says. "It just makes me hopeful that the world is moving away from fear and towards acceptance of those of us who haven't had the easiest times."

Tags: college admissions , mental health , depression

Mental Health in College Students – From Application to Enrollment

August 16, 2022

should i write my college essay about depression

Sometimes it takes unspeakably tragic events to bring the existence of a widespread problem into the national conversation. In the past decade, highly-publicized suicides at Penn, Hamilton College, MIT, NYU, and Cornell, among others, have moved the discussion of mental health in college students right to the forefront of the higher education discourse.

Thankfully, these are, of course, extreme cases of mental health challenges. However, the shift in focus could benefit the massive numbers of students who enter college each year with depression/anxiety. According to a survey by the CDC in 2022, 44% of American adolescents report feeling persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 28% said that they had thoughts of self-harm at some point in their lives. Perhaps even more startling is the fact that only an estimated 40% of those suffering actually receive any form of treatment (the National Institute of Mental Health). According to just about every survey in the world conducted after March 2020, the pandemic has had a profoundly determinantal impact on teens’ (and everybody’s) mental health.

In this piece, we will offer recommendations for dealing with depression/anxiety on your college application. But perhaps more importantly, we will share what mental health experts and current research says are important considerations for managing your illness on campus.

*Disclaimer: Mind you, we are college planning experts, not mental health experts. We are merely summarizing mental health considerations as related to college admissions and attendance. Your mental health provider may offer additional advice based on the specifics of your situation .

Impact on your high school career

For many, dealing with a mental health condition will negatively impact their high school career in some way, potentially impacting areas such as academic performance, school attendance, teacher relationships, and extracurricular involvement. There is ample statistical evidence to support this. For example, students with social phobia are twice as likely to fail a grade as those without. Students with a depression diagnosis have been found to earn significantly lower grades than their similarly-abled peers.

Given the impact of mental illness on a teen’s academics, a significant number of high school seniors are faced with a difficult choice each year—do I reveal my condition on my college application? There is no blanket answer that will guide every applicant. Ultimately, the decision to reveal your condition is an entirely personal one.

Did your academic performance suffer?

Perhaps your mental health issues were managed successfully and never impacted your grades. If this is the case, we advise that there is no reason to reveal your condition on an application. You should, however, still check out our recommendations on how to check out a college’s mental health services (below).

If your academic performance did suffer as a result of your condition and you do choose to share your challenges with prospective colleges in an essay and/or interview, we recommend that you consider framing your experience in one of the following ways:

The “overcoming obstacles” angle

Overcoming challenges and citing evidence of personal growth can be a winning story arc. If a bout of depression during your sophomore year contributed toward failing grades but you received treatment and rebounded academically the following year, then revealing that journey may be extremely helpful to your admissions chances. Knowing that you faced a significant challenge in your life and successfully emerged from it speaks volumes about your resilience, maturity, and grit, traits that are greatly valued by admissions officers.

Weakness as strength

Another approach is highlighting the strength that you draw from what others call an “illness.” An associate of Abraham Lincoln said of our 16th president that the “melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” Yet, many historians feel that Lincoln’s lifelong depression helped sparked his legendary wisdom, insight, and brilliant strategic thinking. Lincoln was hardly alone. Many of the greatest, most creative minds throughout history were, at least in part, driven by mental conditions. Darwin, Michelangelo, and Einstein were all likely sufferers of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. If we were to list all of all the great writers, artists, comedians, actors, and directors who were influenced by depression and anxiety, this blog post would be longer than the 1,017 page novel, Bleak House, penned by Charles Dickens, who was himself a lifelong victim of severe depression.

The semantic shift

Cautious applicants might consider simply substituting the term “medical condition” for “mental illness.” After all, mental health issues are treatable medical conditions in the same vein as mono or a broken bone. Simply stating that you were afflicted by a “serious medical condition” which caused a temporary academic decline and led to you quitting the school newspaper and the baseball team will suffice.

Check out a college’s services ahead of time

In a recent survey of college students with a diagnosed mental health condition, 45% rated their respective college as being somewhere between supportive and very supportive. The other 55% felt that mental health care on campus was less than ideal. Factors that were rated as being most important by students included: access to a psychiatrist for medication management, a 24-hour crisis hotline, community connections to additional mental healthcare, and the school’s overall culture of understanding that college can be stress-inducing and that mental health is paramount.

It is essential that parents and students research the mental health services on campus ahead of time. Check out each prospective college’s counseling office online to get a sense of what is available to students. If a college does not offer long-term therapy on campus, then parents should take the reins and find a good private therapist located near campus who accepts their insurance. Do this well before school starts.

Colleges are expanding mental health services

Many state universities, despite budget crunches, are recognizing the need to expand their mental health offerings. For example, in the fall of 2017, UCLA began offering free online screenings for depression; 2,700 students took advantage. Ohio State opened a dozen new mental health clinics in 2016. Penn State has increased their spending on mental health significantly in the last few years. The University of Michigan and Virginia Tech, in an attempt to make mental health more accessible, have embedded counselors in buildings around campus, rather than at one centralized location. Many schools operate prevention/wellness programs that assist students before they enter a crisis. These schools include Harvard, Georgia Tech, UVA, and Bowdoin College.

Amherst, Skidmore, Princeton, Drexel, and Carnegie Mellon are just a handful of schools that now offer access to 24-hour crisis hotlines manned by either peers or professional counselors. Unfortunately, excessively long wait times for a counseling appointment at many schools persist. At schools like Northwestern, Carleton College, and WashU, wait times to see a counselor range from one-to-three weeks.

Relevant statistics on mental health at college

Just to highlight some other meaningful stats on the subject:

Only 50% of college students report disclosing their mental health issue to their school
Of those with a diagnosed mental illness who dropped out of college, 64% directly attribute this event to their condition/disorder.
Only 36% of college students with a mental illness are sure that their university includes mental health information on their website.
39% of students reported a wait time of 5+ to obtain an appointment for clinical services and supports.
73% of those entering college with previous mental health concerns have experienced a “mental health crisis” while on campus.
Half of students believe that their peers will think less of anyone receiving treatment for mental health.
The percentage of college students seriously considering suicide has doubled in the last decade.
More than 1,000 suicides occur on college campuses each year.

College Transitions bottom line

If you are going to discuss your depression, anxiety, or other mental condition in your application, do so in a strategic manner for the purpose of illuminating otherwise unexplained inconsistencies in your academic record. A well-conceived and well-delivered narrative about your struggles with mental illness can be beneficial to your admissions chances. Contrarily, a poorly crafted disclosure may have the opposite effect.

Of even greater importance is that you do your research on the mental health services offered at each prospective college. Ensuring that the necessary supports at your disposal is critical to your overall well-being. It is also likely critical to your academic performance over the next four years.

To view hundreds of free and easy-to-sort tables of higher education data, visit our DATAVERSE .

Application Strategies

Andrew Belasco

A licensed counselor and published researcher, Andrew's experience in the field of college admissions and transition spans two decades. He has previously served as a high school counselor, consultant and author for Kaplan Test Prep, and advisor to U.S. Congress, reporting on issues related to college admissions and financial aid.

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How to Discuss Your Mental Health on College Applications

Should you write about depression in your personal statement? Should you disclose mental health challenges elsewhere on your college application? Here’s what experts say.

Within the next few months, many rising high school seniors will be staring at a blank computer screen with the same question on their minds: What should I write about in my college application essay? This question can feel heavy. After all, by the time students approach the end of their junior year, they’ve surely heard lots about “THE” college essay. The concept can feel overwhelming so it’s no surprise that many students struggle when it comes to choosing the perfect topic.

For students who experienced a mental health challenge while in high school, this question takes on another dimension. Should they talk about how they coped with say, depression, or any other mental health condition? Should they refer to it only in passing? Should they avoid mentioning it at all? What is the best way to handle such an important topic?

While this is a very complicated topic, the college planning experts I talked with all offered similar advice.

The Purpose of a College Application Essay

Before thinking about whether or not you should write about mental health in your college essay, you should remember what the essay — or the “personal statement”— is all about in the first place. What is the purpose of the essay?

No matter which prompt students select, and for all college applicants, those with or without mental health challenges, the essay is the only part of the application in which college admissions officers have the opportunity to hear the voices of the student. The rest of the application contains numbers, statistics, and comments from teachers and counselors.

This is why the personal statement, as college planning experts concur, is where you should share part of your true self in the most positive light. Think about what a college wants to know about you as a person, or what a university would gain by having you become a part of the campus community. Dig deep to figure out what makes you, you.

Use your essay as an opportunity to bring your college application to life. Try to strive for it to represent you in an authentic yet optimistic way. One former reader of applications at a top university’s admission office shared a fun way to see if your essay checks out. She asked me, “Does the essay pass the midnight test”?

Picture an exhausted admissions officer with a stack of unread application files on her desk. She is reading yours at midnight at the end of a 16-hour day. Does your essay draw the officer in and make her eager to read until the end of your essay to learn more about you? Will she be eager enough for her to conclude that, yes, we want this student on our campus next fall? Or does your essay sound far too similar to some of the others she’s read that day?

The purpose of your essay is to take the reader beyond the numbers (test scores and GPA) and into who you are as a real live human being.

Experts on Writing About Mental Health

All counselors interviewed for this piece agreed that students’ college essays should not be about their struggles with mental health. Wendy Kahn , a Chicago-based college planner, and Anna Seltz, of Higher Ed U , a college consulting organization in Philadelphia, both spoke about how students should try to talk about themselves in a positive light, taking the opportunity to showcase one of their many outstanding qualities, like intellectual curiosity, personal growth, or maturity.

A couple of the counselors — Bruce Vinik of Vinik Educational Services and Marsha Shaines of College Strategies in Kensington, Maryland — said that the only case in which a student should consider writing about her mental health challenges is if the struggle truly defines her as a person. Even then, both counselors saw this as the rare exception, and suggest that instead, most students should take advantage of the opportunity to explore one of the many other attributes that makes them unique. Vinik says that mental health problems should only be shared in the essay if the college would not be able to understand the applicant without knowing about this part of her. Generally, he discourages selecting this as a primary topic.

The Additional Information Section

All of the college planners mentioned above agree that if your mental health struggle in high school clearly impacted your performance, then you should mention it in the “Additional Information” portion of the Common Application — but only in a factual manner. If you missed three months of your sophomore year to deal with a mental health condition, you should explain that you spent those months dealing with a “health challenge,” overcame it, and are now back on track, advises Vinik.

The three other college counselors generally agreed with this sentiment. All expressed that if the mental health challenges have made an impact on your grades, involvement in class, attendance, or ability to participate in school activities, you should provide a short, factual summary (no more than two paragraphs) for background purposes, always emphasizing your recovery after these difficult moments and your preparedness for a college environment.

Seltz suggests that talking about this in your admissions interview may be another route that applicants can explore. Seltz recommends taking an approach like the one outlined for personal statements above: Briefly explain how the challenge affected your grades and focus mostly on the fact that those problems are now under control. Making sure to emphasize the way/s that the challenge helped you to grow as a person is also important.

All of the college planners suggest that you talk with your high school counselor to ensure that what you are saying about mental illness in the college application is consistent with what the counselor may or may not say in her own counselor recommendation. Or, if you’d prefer that the counselor not address your mental health issues, request that as well. School counselors are almost always open to any guidance you may have for what you’d like them to include in or leave out of your letter of recommendation.

Dealing With Mental Health Challenges Past the Application

Being told that you cannot share a part of yourself that may have had a large impact on your life can be difficult to hear. Unfortunately, mental health is a stigmatized topic, and it’s difficult to explore its nuances and complexities in the short and streamlined format of a college application. It is also extremely important to remember that with or without mental health challenges, you are far more complex than a 650-word personal statement.

The fact that you are not writing about it on your application doesn’t mean that colleges don’t want the “real” you, or that you will be unable to succeed. A mental health condition does not disqualify you from having an excellent collegiate experience by any means, the same way that a physical limitation would not interfere with your success as a student. As you explore your college options, be sure to look for campuses that are particularly mental-health friendly, and focus on finding resources you can rely on as a student. From counseling services to wellness organizations, many campuses make student mental health a priority, and selecting this kind of college will help you embrace your challenges and thrive in a new environment.

If you are worried that your problems are not yet under control — and that college may exacerbate them — you may want to consider taking a gap year and working with a local counselor to prepare for the big transition. There are lots of really wonderful gap year programs for students in this exact position. If you think you might be interested in this option, talk with your school counselor about exploring what programs are available to you.

Be personal in your college application essay — but do so in an optimistic and positive way. The purpose of the essay is to convince the reader that you belong on their campus next fall. Don’t leave the reader with any unanswered questions or red flags about you. Be clear about who you are and your will to enhance whatever campus you find yourself on. This is the best way to tell the story of who you are.

If there are circumstances that need to be explained — such as time off, a drop in grades, or diminished participation in extracurricular activities, do so in a factual and concise manner in the “Additional Information” section.

Yes, you may have experienced a mental health challenge, and/or you may be going to college with mental illness. But don’t let that singularly define you as a person. You have the propensity to offer much more to a college than your diagnosis. And the personal statement essay is the place to show the college who you are as an individual, why you are ready for college, and what strong and special qualities you will bring to the campus community if accepted.

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Mention depression in your college essay? (yes or no)

As a BetterHelp affiliate, we may receive compensation from BetterHelp if you purchase products or services through the links provided.

The Optimistminds editorial team is made up of psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health professionals. Each article is written by a team member with exposure to and experience in the subject matter. The article then gets reviewed by a more senior editorial member. This is someone with extensive knowledge of the subject matter and highly cited published material.

In this article, we will explain if you should mention depression in your college essay or not, and other important points to remember while writing your college essay.

Mention depression in a college essay?

College essays are meant to provide an insight into your personality that your academic transcripts and certificates do not. They are a way for you to introduce yourself to the college committee. That is why it is important to mention what is your core personality and who you are as a person. If you feel that depression is now a part of you, something that has changed you and has helped you to grow then you should mention it. College administrators and individuals who will review your college essays know that a lot of students these days experience depression and therefore are accepting of it rather than seeing it as an undesirable trait.

In addition, they accept the possibility that students may sometimes use the services of professional essay writing services if they are experiencing psychological problems.

Reasons to mention depression in your college essay

In case you wish to mention depression in your college essay here are some reasons why you should:

It impacted your high school experience

Your academic performance suffered, to explain a gap year or period, you wish to highlight how you overcame it, to show how you turned your weakness into your strength, it defines you as a person, to highlight how you handle your mental health now.

You shouldn’t just mention your depression in your college essay unless it impacted your high school experience. In case because of depression, you felt that you were unable to participate in the school extracurricular activities or were not able to enjoy it as much as others. Then you can mention it, but ensure that its impact was quite significant in nature. Another reason to mention your depression in your college is to highlight how high school can be a little difficult for some individuals and how it affects one’s mental health negatively. But ensure that you are not blaming the education system but providing a viewpoint.

In case you were unable to perform well academically due to depression, then you can mention it in your college essay. You can provide an explanation as to why your academy performance suffered so much while reassuring the committee that you have bounced back from it and won’t let it affect your college grades now. Especially if you were a student who used to score very high marks and in a particular year were not able to score as much. In case there are inconsistencies between your grades you can use your college essay and an explanation platform for it.

In case you took a gap year or period during your school or after your high school ended you can mention your depression in your college essay. Be sure to explain how and why it was necessary for you to take this year, build upon your mental health and how you were able to successfully overcome depression after taking this gap year. Mention how you felt during this time of period and how other people like your family members, friends and classmates help you with it. Mention how your experience during the gap years was, what other activities did you learn or do during this time period, be sure to mention any internship or course that you did.

A reason to mention depression in your college is it could be to illustrate your journey on how you overcame depression. You could mention the feelings and the emotions that you went through during this time, how your family and friends helped you, and what different activities did you engage in to help with depression. You could also mention your journey of self-realization during the therapy sessions or how going through depression changed your outlook on life and the world in general.

You can mention depression in your college essay to show them how you turned your weakness into your strength, that is how you overcame depression, and rather than seeing it as a mistake turned it into a learning experience. Mention what you learned during this time of yours and how your outlook towards life is no different from before.

If you feel that you are a different person because of depression you can mention it in your college essay explaining what changes it brought in you. In the essay explain what type of a person you were before and how depression changed things about you that you are now proud of. Be sure to only mention in your college essay if you feel that it has changed you and the definition of who you are. Explain your journey from your older self to new you and highlight what realizations you mean about yourself.

If you feel that you are more and better equipped at handling your mental health and actively taking steps to improve it even now, mention your depression in your college essay. In case you have started ensuring that you do yoga or practice mindfulness, take out time to explore your hobbies then it is a good idea to mention these things in your college essay.

Points to remember when you want to mention depression in your college essay

Here are a few points that you must remember while writing and mentioning depression in your college essay:

You are not alone

It is okay to talk about your struggles, you are more than just being depressed, focus on your coping skills, research about your college’s counseling services.

Remember that you’re not alone and that many students just like you have also struggled through depression and gotten into college. College administrators know that and know how tough it can be to deal with and overcome depression. Knowing that you have gone through something as life-changing as depression and come and be able to come out of it. It takes a lot of courage and strength to be able to do that. You are understood and wanted by colleges based on who you are now.

Depression is not an easy thing to go through and it is even harder to overcome it and begin to rebuild your life. It is okay to talk about your struggles, you’re weak moments and times when it was tough for you. Be confident about your life journey and the obstacles that you have faced. There is nothing for you to hide or be ashamed of. Be comfortable in talking and expressing about depression as it will show your maturity and how well you can handle adversities in life.

Remember that depression is something that happened to you and that it does not define who you are. You’re more than just being depressed you’re also all your other personalities and traits. Just like if a person has a cough we do not say that they are “cough”, similarly you had or have depression but you are not “depression”. Do not let depression be the only thing that defines you as you are much more than that.

While writing the college essay be sure to mention what different coping skills and mechanisms did you use to overcome depression. Don’t let the college essay just be about your struggles and the problems that you faced. Mention how you tackled them and overcame them. The faculty is more interested in knowing how you deal with difficulties and problems in life rather than which problem you faced. So let your essay be more about the coping skills that you have used and the new ones that you developed because of depression rather than talking just about the downfalls that depression caused.

While applying to a college ensure that you go through the website properly and research as to what counseling services your college provides in case you have difficulty keeping up with the curriculum and college life. This will also help you have an understanding of what your college’s approach to mental health is. If the college has a proper counseling center where 24*7 help is available. It indicates that the college is aware of the importance of mental health and is working actively to ensure that the students are given the proper treatment and care they wish for.

In this article, we explained if you should mention depression in your college essay or not, and other important points to remember while writing your college essay.

BetterHelp: A Better Alternative

Those who are seeking therapy online may also be interested in BetterHelp . BetterHelp offers plenty of formats of therapy, ranging from live chats, live audio sessions and live video sessions. In addition, unlimited messaging through texting, audio messages and even video messages are available here.

BetterHelp also offers couples therapy and therapy for teenagers in its platform. Furthermore, group sessions can also be found in this platform, covering more than twenty different topics related to mental health and mental illness. The pricing of BetterHelp is also pretty cost-effective, especially considering the fact that the platform offers financial aid to most users.

FAQs: Mention depression in a college essay?

Is it okay to write about depression in a college essay.

It is okay to write about depression in a college essay when you are mentioning it to explain an inconsistency in your academic records. For example, explaining a gap year or drop in grades.

Is it OK to write about mental health in college essays?

It is ok to write about mental health in college essays, but avoid making it the main essay. You can mention it if you deem it to be very important. It is preferable if you do not write your main essay about your mental health.

What should you not write your college essay on?

You should not be bragging about your accomplishments and achievements in your college essay. Your transcripts and other certificates will do that for you. Avoid writing about highly sensitive topics and illegal or illicit behaviors you might have been a part of in the past. Also do not write about how lucky you are to be able to apply there.

Is it bad to swear in a college essay?

Yes, it is a terrible idea to swear in a college essay as many articles by college admission boards have mentioned that using profanities in college essays leads to people losing their seats. They consider using swear words a significant mistake that every student must avoid.

What are the best college essay topics?

The best college essay topics are where one shares their life story, how they learned from difficulties in life, when they challenged a long-held belief of theirs or how they grew as an individual. It can mention things that captivate you, people you admire, or any other topic of your choice.

Do colleges look at mental health records?

It is actually illegal for college to specifically ask for details regarding your mental or physical health. As it is considered discrimination, they can not look at your mental health records.

References

https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/tackling-depression-anxiety-on-your-college-application-and-beyond

https://www.noodle.com/articles/how-to-discuss-your-mental-health-on-college-applications

https://blog.getintocollege.com/depression-should-i-talk-about-my-mental-illness-in-my-application/

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Depression: Should I Talk about My Mental Illness in My Application?

Written by Mary Sue Youn on September 2nd, 2017

college admissions advice ,
college applications ,
First of all, know that you are not alone. According to recent studies by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health anxiety and depression are the most common mental illnesses seen by college counseling centers. In fact, there has been a 30% increase in counseling center utilization on campus over the last five years. Please know that many students struggle with similar issues and colleges are accustomed to these inquiries.
Don’t be afraid to talk about your struggles in your application. Students dealing with mental illness in high school have often demonstrated tremendous fortitude in overcoming their challenges and carrying on with their schooling. However, frequent absences or substantial dips in grades are noticed during an application review. As an admissions officer, I strongly preferred to hear the reasons behind these anomalies directly from the student, rather than their teacher or guidance counselor. In fact, our counseling center showed us that students who could openly talk about their mental illness and advocate for themselves and what they needed were much more likely to have positive outcomes in the college setting. I particularly advise students to write about their depression if there was a significant change in grades or time away from school while undergoing treatment. Contrary to popular belief, mental illness was not seen in the admission office as a reason to deny the student, but provided necessary context for the admission reader about that student’s high school experience.
Do realize that you are more than your mental illness—and your main essay should reflect that. The main personal statement of your application should be an expression of your unique personality and interests. Are you a scientist, a writer, an artist? Are you funny, do you love to debate, or are you a meticulous researcher? Your main essay should reflect the wonderful qualities that you bring to any college campus, not only your depression. A statement about your treatment for depression is usually most appropriate for the Additional Information section on the Common Application , or for a supplemental essay in a college’s own portion of the application. Keep the statement short (1-2 paragraphs at most), and focus on the coping skills you’ve developed from treatment that will serve you well in college.
Be aware of campus resources before you head off to college officially. Ask questions about counseling centers when you visit campus, or give them a call if you are unable to visit. Many campuses provide individual or group therapy on campus, while others refer students to work with therapists local to the area. Even if you are not currently experiencing depressive symptoms, it is important to know what’s available should your depression reoccur during the stresses of college life. The National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) has a wonderful college guide resource to get you started .

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Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?

Mental health struggles can create challenges you must overcome during your education and could be an opportunity for you to show how you’ve handled challenges and overcome obstacles. If you’re considering writing your essay for college admission on this topic, consider talking to your school counselor or with an English teacher on how to frame the essay.

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Should I "Recall" My Common App Essay on Depression?

My high school English teacher had us turn in our Common App essays as an assignment. She made suggestions and corrections, and I submitted my Common App with that essay version on it a few weeks ago. Now I'm doing some supplemental essays for other schools and my mom hired an essay specialist to review them. For one of my supplementals, I used my Common App essay (this is a school not on Common App, so they won't see it twice). The essay consultant ripped it to shreds, said it didn't fit the prompt at all and was on a subject (my depression after my parents' divorce) that she said is sort of forbidden. Now I'm wondering if my English teacher was just looking for grammatical problems and doesn't know what colleges are looking for so she didn't edit the content -- just the grammar and structure. Since I already turned in the common app, I'm really nervous now. Can I "recall" my Common Apps or would that be worse? Two of my deadlines already passed.

Once you've submitted your Common Application essay, it's usually a bad idea to write to colleges to say “Never mind." This conveys a message to the admission committees that suggests, “I didn't put adequate thought into my initial try, so now I expect you to take extra time to deal with a non-standard situation." Yet, over the eons, “The Dean" has sometimes seen students send second essays with no apparent penalty. Thus, I'll occasionally say, “Go ahead and try it," but only when the pros seem to outweigh potential cons.

In your case, however, they may not. For starters, even if you send a second essay, it's likely that the admission officials will look at your first one as well. (This will depend on protocol at different colleges, which will vary.) Secondly, because your English teacher signed off on your essay, I assume that the organization, spelling and mechanics were fine. So the real issue here is that you wrote about depression which your private counselor has told you is a no-no, but may actually not be. It depends on what you said.

I, too, often discourage students from writing about depression unless this depression caused low grades or other transcript anomalies that cry out to be explained. But even then, I typically advise using the “Additional Information" section of the application for this explanation, rather than the primary essay. Nonetheless, I've read primary essays written on depression that were excellent ... and appropriate. The quality of the writing is what counts the most. However, it's also important for a depression essay to state (or to at least imply) that its author is fully ready to embrace college life ... with all of its potential stresses.

So if you think that your essay shows that you've overcome your post-divorce depression and that your essay won't leave admission folks wondering if you can handle the adjustment to college life, then don't worry about this anymore. But if you suspect that this essay will spawn concern in admission offices that you're not ready for the demands just ahead, then you might want to send an “update" letter to all your colleges that clarifies your readiness. Ask the college officials to add this to your file. (And if you fear that perhaps you're really not ready, consider a gap year . Then you can reapply with a brand-new essay!)

From your question, it sounds as if one reason that the consultant disliked your Common App essay was that it didn't fit the prompt provided for the supplemental essay. Of course, “The Dean" can't weigh in on this without seeing both. However, if the consultant's main objection was that you raised a red flag by mentioning depression, you should rest assured that it may not be a problem at all, as long as admission committees don't question your fitness to start college next fall.

Finally, keep in mind that the struggle with depression is part of who you are, and even if you've been told that it's not the wisest essay topic choice, it's certainly an honest one. So take comfort in the fact that the colleges that accept you anyway are welcoming the real you, and not some whitewashed version that was created for your applications.

If you'd like to submit a question to College Confidential, please send it along here .

Sally Rubenstone

Sally Rubenstone knows the competitive and often convoluted college admission process inside out: From the first time the topic of college comes up at the dinner table until the last duffel bag is unloaded on a dorm room floor. She is the co-author of Panicked Parents' Guide to College Admissions; The Transfer Student's Guide to Changing Colleges and The International Student's Guide to Going to College in America. Sally has appeared on NBC's Today program and has been quoted in countless publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Weekend, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, People and Seventeen. Sally has viewed the admissions world from many angles: As a Smith College admission counselor for 15 years, an independent college counselor serving students from a wide range of backgrounds and the author of College Confidential's "Ask the Dean" column. She also taught language arts, social studies, study skills and test preparation in 10 schools, including American international schools in London, Paris, Geneva, Athens and Tel Aviv. As senior advisor to College Confidential since 2002, Sally has helped hundreds of students and parents navigate the college admissions maze. In 2008, she co-founded College Karma, a private college consulting firm, with her College Confidential colleague Dave Berry, and she continues to serve as a College Confidential advisor. Sally and her husband, Chris Petrides, became first-time parents in 1997 at the ripe-old age of 45. So Sally was nearly an official senior citizen when her son Jack began the college selection process, and when she was finally able to practice what she had preached for more than three decades.

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Addressing Depression in Your Personal Statement

college application essays
essay topic

Did you know 20% of teenagers experience depression before reaching adulthood? It is also during this time that college applicants have to answer the most intimate question in order to gain acceptance at their dream school. What defines you?

While it may feel extremely vulnerable to talk about your experience with depression, don’t let that immediately deter you from choosing it as your personal statement essay topic. Here are 5 examples that may help you approach the topic in an essay:

UC Irvine ‘17

Throughout the past few years, I have gone through depression. The inability to focus not only in school, but also in life, is something I have struggled to overcome. The majority of the time, I am able to successfully distinguish my emotions from my academics because of my overly organized tendencies. At other times, the feelings that come with depression are inevitable. Depression, for me, is hopelessness. My biggest struggle with depression is not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel; therefore, this way of thinking has caused me to feel unmotivated, alone, and frightened. Because of this, I have spent endless nights contemplating my life till 4 or 5 in the morning, I have no motivation to wake up in the mornings, and I feel pain and grief on a daily basis. Keep reading.

Brittanybea

Uc berkeley ‘19.

On a warm August morning I sat shivering and shaking in the waiting room to my doctor’s office. I had my mother make the appointment but didn’t give her the reason; I’m not even sure I really knew the reason. I just knew something was wrong. The past five years had been all uphill - outwardly, at least. I was doing increasingly well in school, growing more independent, and had greater opportunities at my feet. Inwardly, however, was an entirely different story. Those five years felt like an upbeat movie I was watching while in my own personal prison. I was happy for the characters, even excited for their accomplishments. The problem was that my outward self was a character entirely distinct from the internal me. View full essay.

869749923096609FB

Williams college ‘19.

Perhaps the greatest blessing my parents have ever granted me was the move from our apartment in the Bronx to a two-family home in Queens, two blocks away from a public library. The library had all the boons my young heart could desire: bounties of books, air conditioning in the summer, and sweet solace from a dwelling teeming with the cries of an infant sister, a concept I couldn’t yet fathom. Read more.

When I was younger, people chided me for being pessimistic. It was my sincere belief that there were no rewards to be reaped from a life here on earth. I was bored, unhappy, and apathetic. War, injustice, environmental collapse, the mean thing X said to me the other day-it all made me see the world as a tumultuous and unpleasant place. Continue reading.

879216135461584FB

Dish soap, pepper, a toothpick, and an empty pie tin. The first materials I ever used to perform a simple experiment in grade school. Looking back that would be the moment I fell in love with science. I can still feel the excitement I felt as I watched as the pepper dart off to the edges of the pie tin as I touched the water with the end of a soap coated toothpick. Though I didn’t have to question how or why the reaction happened, I never stopped wondering. It was then that a passion for science ignited in me. It was a fire in my soul that could never die out. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I grew older, the fire within me began to dim and in the year 2012, it became extinguished; the world as I knew it had ended. View full profile.

While this essay topic helped these students gain acceptances to UC Irvine , UC Berkeley , Williams , Vassar and NYU , it doesn’t mean it will work in the exact same way for you. Brainstorm and think carefully about what you want to write in your personal statement and how you want to share your own, unique story. For more inspiration, AdmitSee has a database of 60,000+ successful college applications files waiting for you!

About The Author

Frances was born in Hong Kong and received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University. She loves super sad drama television, cooking, and reading. Her favorite person on Earth isn’t actually a member of the AdmitSee team - it’s her dog Cooper.

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Guest Essay

I Edited Mental Illness Out of My College Applications. I’m Not Alone.

An abstract illustration of a person, made of stacked green and blue blobs, writing with a pencil.

By Emi Nietfeld

Ms. Nietfeld is the author of a memoir, “Acceptance.”

When I applied to college in the 2009-10 school year, I wasn’t worried about my grades or extracurriculars. Instead, I agonized over a dilemma that’s familiar to more students than ever as the Common Application deadline looms: What should I disclose about my mental health?

As I wrote my applications, my past was both my greatest asset and my biggest liability. I’d spent time in foster care and homeless, circumstances that made me attractive to the handful of selective universities that offered full scholarships to low-income students — my only hope at avoiding crushing loans. In an applicant pool filled with squash champions, concert organists and third-generation double legacies, I had my story.

But my experiences also affected me and my academic record in ways that weren’t so appealing: Like approximately 80 percent of current foster youths and many former ones, I had serious mental health diagnoses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and disordered eating. From ages 13 to 15, I was hospitalized repeatedly. Before being placed in a foster home, I spent nine months in a locked treatment center. I’d attended four to eight high schools, depending on how you counted. How could I possibly explain all that?

Officially, colleges say that students can share as much about their mental health as feels comfortable. But in practice, it seems clear that schools are nervous about accepting adolescents who divulge psychiatric histories. That perception is reinforced by high-profile lawsuits alleging discrimination against students with mental health disabilities, including an ongoing suit against Yale University and a similar one settled by Stanford University in 2019.

“We have all read the headlines of students on college campuses who have either harmed others or harmed themselves,” said Kat Cohen, a private admissions consultant who helped me, pro bono, with my applications. “These are the things that colleges worry about if they admit someone who is not stable.”

These mixed messages are forcing more and more students to make impossible choices amid a teenage mental health crisis. Should applicants play it safe and conceal their emotional troubles — even when it means leaving low grades and gaps in transcripts unexplained? Or should they tell the truth and risk getting flagged as a liability?

For those with mental health conditions, college admissions are unfairly arduous, an injustice that has long-lasting ramifications for both students and society. Many teenagers with psychological disorders end up at lower-quality schools than they could have attended otherwise, affecting their career options and earning potential. And since elite universities produce a disproportionate number of politicians and managers, society loses out by having fewer people in power who deeply understand mental illness and how it intersects with almost every major issue.

“In the age of Instagram activists, I thought it wouldn’t be as bad,” Jia Suo, a high school senior from Sugar Land, Texas, told me about the stigma of mental illness. “But when I got out of my treatment center my junior year, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I lost every single one of my friends.”

After an inpatient program for suicidal ideation (a diagnosis Ms. Suo attributes to normal angst misinterpreted by doctors), she did not receive credit for the classwork she did there. Looking at her grades — C’s and incompletes in a transcript filled with A’s — she figured she must have been given a zero for every missed assignment. She said she reached out to her guidance counselor and homebound teacher but was told it was too late and there was nothing they could do.

Initially, Ms. Suo wanted to explain herself in her college application essay. She wrote a personal statement about how her institutionalization motivated her to study law after meeting girls who had been sex trafficked and boys who languished in the facility for months waiting for foster homes.

But sharing her struggles was risky. A family friend who worked in admissions advised her, “Say you slacked off junior year.” Ms. Suo crossed her dream school, Cornell, off her list and has instead applied to 17 colleges without any explanation for the sudden drop in G.P.A. She resents that her brush with psychiatry will shape what college she attends, but it feels safer to talk about her institutionalization in The New York Times than in her applications. “I’m OK with the whole world knowing about it, but at the same time I just know the stigma they’re going to have at colleges about this.” In three months, when Ms. Suo gets the final acceptance and rejection letters, she’ll know the true impact.

When I applied to college, Ms. Cohen — Dr. Kat, as I and her other clients call her — advised the opposite approach at first. “You have to be extremely explicit,” I remember her warning me. “Otherwise they’ll have no idea how bad things were.” This surprised me. Until that point, the adults around me made me feel my symptoms were evidence of what was wrong with me, not evidence of what was wrong with my circumstances. Though I was deeply ashamed, when I applied to Yale early, I attached a timeline detailing my mom’s hoarding and my overmedication, culminating with me regaining my emotional stability as a scholarship student at boarding school.

I was rejected. My school guidance counselor called Yale’s admissions office and relayed to me that though my grades and test scores were similar to other applicants’, as she put it in an email to me, “regarding the past issues, the list was daunting.” Dr. Kat also queried her network and surmised that Yale wanted to minimize its risk after several high-profile on-campus suicides of college students around the country. “It was just T.M.I.,” she told me — too much information.

A spokeswoman for Yale this month said in a statement to The New York Times that she could not discuss my case because admission files are confidential. But she did say, “This account of an admissions decision from over a decade ago is at odds with our admissions practices and philosophy,” adding that Yale’s admissions process is “holistic.”

She continued, “The admissions committee does not discriminate against any applicant for health reasons.”

For my next round of applications, I wrote a simple explanation for why I had changed schools and thereby excised three years of my life: the diagnoses, the drugs, the self-inflicted scars. I became a parallel person who’d gone through the same things but come out unscathed. I hit “submit,” applying to 10 schools, including Harvard.

While I waited, I lived in fear of being found out. In my dreams, admissions officers interrogated me. They called me a liar and a cheater.

But after three months of nightmares, on April 1, 2010, I got into Harvard.

I screamed when I opened the email; I danced in the rain. Then guilt fogged the world. Harvard accepted 7 percent of applicants that spring. I felt alternate versions of myself trailing me, fates in which I hadn’t been able to hide my past and it haunted me into adulthood.

I spoke to current and former admissions officers this fall, seeking answers to the question that had mystified me as a teenager: How much should students talk about mental health on their college applications? Echoing the advice of other professionals, Claudia Marroquin, the dean of admissions at Bowdoin College, implied that applicants should not feel pressure to disclose. Pressed for more specifics, she told me that students “have to feel comfortable with what they’re sharing.” This platitude made me seethe with frustration: Even if I was comfortable sharing everything, I suspected that the colleges were not comfortable hearing it. The students I interviewed all sensed there was a line, but few of us were lucky enough to know where it lay.

Only Dr. Kat was willing to speak candidly. In the years since she initially advised me to discuss my struggles in detail, she has realized that this approach may be unwise.

“Without exception,” she said, “reading a personal statement about the applicant’s mental health struggles — that’s going to immediately raise a red flag unless it can really be contextualized as something that the student has triumphed over.”

She emphasized that mental health had to be handled on “a case-by-case basis,” ideally in close consultation with the student’s school guidance counselor.

But that, too, is fraught. At 16, I sought out Dr. Kat’s help because even at a private boarding school, my counselor didn’t have the bandwidth to give me the personal attention I needed. The pro bono services I received would’ve cost more than $16,000 in 2009 dollars. When I spoke to students about their experiences, far greater than the variety of emotional issues was the range in support. Even at Ms. Suo’s affluent suburban school, a single counselor could juggle more than 400 students at a time. Students with less help turn to YouTube gurus and Discord servers where peers workshop their essays.

Favour Osisioma, who immigrated from Nigeria to rural Tennessee at 13, started 2020 on track to attend an elite school. Then Covid hit. She found herself caretaker for her two younger siblings — the three of them remote-learning on one computer while their mom worked 100-hour weeks and Ms. Osisioma worked part time at McDonald’s. “I felt that it was my job to bring my family out of poverty,” she said. Her grades fell, escalating the anxiety she’d had before the pandemic into paralyzing panic attacks. She remembers an adviser saying, “‘I never expected you to disappoint me in this way.’”

Ms. Osisioma agonized over how to explain this to colleges. “I was trying to get the perfect words,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure anyone would see me and think, ‘This is an attractive package.’” In her senior year, she won a number of accolades, including a prestigious Coca-Cola scholarship. A video crew surprised her at school with a jumbo check.

“I remember coming home and putting it down in my room and still crying because I didn’t know what to say in my applications about the anxiety.” At the time, a single guidance counselor was assisting 800 students with everything from class scheduling to college counseling. Staring at her Yale application, Ms. Osisioma watched the deadline tick past and became so overwhelmed that she couldn’t walk and felt herself going in and out of consciousness. She had to see a neurologist to rule out seizures. She ended up attending college a year later than planned at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She’s a university scholar there and enjoys her classes but feels a long way from where she hoped she’d be.

Meanwhile, prep schools often employ former admissions officers as counselors, with caseloads closer to 30 students. Jessica Smith, the director of college counseling at Westtown School in Pennsylvania, said she takes pains to protect “students’ private business.” She added, “Even when a psychiatric crisis affects a transcript, there’s a lot I can control about how much it shows up.”

Jaimi Salone, now in their final quarter at Stanford, benefited from this kind of advice while a student at the Blake School in Minneapolis, which they attended on scholarship. In their essay, they wrote frankly about depression, anxiety and shame after their mom’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death — providing context for why they “did not look like what was expected of a Stanford admit,” with a 3.06 G.P.A. and many absences. But at the suggestion of their college counselor, they omitted their sophomore-year hospitalization. “Is it lying to not include?” they wondered. “What is considered an accurate representation of me as a student when I actually do have mental health issues?”

Even after they got in, the stress stayed. “I was worried my admissions would be revoked if other information came out.”

My Harvard application taught me what was acceptable to share and what was not. I sensed that colleges wanted a pristine survivor who was not marred by trauma. At 16, I didn’t realize that it is impossible to emerge from certain hardships unscathed; the perfect overcomer is a fantasy that some young people are coached into creating. This illusion can do great damage. I saw that I was not that person, which caused me deep shame.

Effective admissions policies require grasping how mental illness manifests in different students’ lives. The same crisis that leads to an outpouring of support for a wealthy child might cause a foster youth to be sent to a locked facility, prescribed antipsychotics and forced to change schools. Stigma varies widely across communities, affecting how teenagers view their struggles and what leeway they get from adults. Some kids are far less likely to be diagnosed and treated; others receive superfluous labels and get overmedicated. Understanding these disparities is crucial in the face of worsening adolescent mental health and ever more competitive standards at the colleges that produce an outsize share of leaders.

For a decade, I believed my story was an anomaly, but every year that seems less and less true. There are so many young people unable to hide their crises. We all lose out if this disqualifies them from a better future.

Emi Nietfeld ( @eminietfeld ) is the author of a memoir, “ Acceptance .”

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An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a city in Texas. It is Sugar Land, not Sugarland.

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Writing Your College Essay About Depression

So, you want to know how to write your college essay about Depression. Perhaps you don’t know if writing your college essay about Depression would even be allowed, or if it would disqualify you. To not waste your time, we’re going to provide our professional opinion on this.

Long story short: yes, you may write about Depression in your college admissions. However, there are certain limits that must be drawn.

There are also instances when writing about your Depression may actually increase your chances of acceptance. Though, you need to write your essays correctly for this to work.

We’ll cover these in detail below.

How to Write Your College Essay About Depression

Table of Contents

When is it Okay to Write About Mental Illness in College Essays?

When can i write about mental illness or abuse in my college essays is it too much, don’t just write about depression. write about the effects., does my depression justify my low grades in the college admissions process.

Write About How Depression and Your Overcoming/Coping Makes You a Suitable Candidate.

Example College Essay About Depression

Let’s not waste any time and get right to the point again!

It is okay to write about mental illness and Depression in your college essay as long as it proves that you’re a suitable student. Thus, you should be asking yourself, “how does my experience with mental illness or Depression make me a strong candidate?”

First, let’s look at what makes a great candidate to begin with. To do this, you’ll need to turn off your student brain and turn on the business brain. Although colleges are not businesses –some for-profit ones are, though– they definitely function like one. You can think of the admissions process at a university as a calculator for ROI (Return of Investment). That means the admissions office determines which students to pick based on the applicants they believe to have the most potential for success in their school.

Let’s take this example:

Take a look at the stats both Joshua Liu and Amy Alvarado have. If you were an admissions officer looking into this, which person seems to be more impressive?

Well, it’s not quite easy to differentiate between the two since these are only surface-level stats. However, at first glance, we can see that Amy Alvarado seems rather impressive. Despite her being diagnosed with Depression, Amy Alvarado defies both gender and cultural expectations and aims for computer science. In addition, she also manages to earn a 3.7 GPA whilst coping with her Depression.

As an admissions officer, you would be wise to invest your time and money on educating Amy Alvarado at your institution. She has potential considering her disadvantages. In other words, you can write your college essay about depression if you have strong attributes to your application which demonstrate a significant disadvantage. Maybe you have a decent GPA, or you performed well as a musician in your school’s orchestra despite your depression. Now, this is not the only reason you may write about depression in your college essay.

Let’s deconstruct another example:

Notice the difference between June and Amy. June does not have any strong attributes such as extracurriculars, or strong academics, just low-mid range grades and Depression. However, just because she does not have strong academics does not mean she should avoid writing about Depression in her college essay entirely. If she is capable of convincing the admissions officers that she can perform well despite her Depression, then it may serve to show she is more capable than her grades show.

So, in general, you can write your college essay about Depression. If you have strong grades or extracurriculars, your Depression may serve to show you have untapped potential. If you do not have that, and only have lower grades and Depression, then you will need to describe how you are a strong candidate despite your Depression in your application essays.

Remember: with the rise of mental instability amongst students, mental stability is becoming a more critical factor in the admissions process than ever before. This brings us to the next point!

Just how much is too much? Can I write about how I cut myself in my college essays? Can I write about my eating disorder in my college essays, or traumas such as sexual abuse?

For obvious reasons, there are instances when situations are just “too much” to share. There are moments when writing about your traumatic experiences or Depression CAN be too much personal information. The keyword is this: “can”. Though, how do you know when it’s too much?

You know you should not write about your mental illness or Depression if it poses too strong a possibility that you are unable to perform well in your academic career. So, for instance, you may have experienced long-term traumas that haunt you even today. They may pose a great danger to your academic performance and even your overall college experience.

It is important to only talk about Depression or mental illnesses if and only if you are capable of proving that you can both cope with it now and in the future.

Please also note that these are not hard and fast rules. It is entirely possible for students to be accepted despite having admitted instability. You just want to make sure that, when writing your college essay about Depression, you write it to your advantage and not your disadvantage. Now, how does one do that? We’ll get to that in the next 3 points below.

If you want to write your college essay about Depression without turning the admissions officers away, you need to write about the effects Depression had on you. This can encompass both the negative effects (obstacles it presented to you) as well as the positive (ways in which you’ve grown).

When writing about the effects Depression had on you in your essay, make sure always to turn back to the positives. There are two reasons for this: one, we don’t want to end on a negative note and leave a sour impression on the admissions officers; two, we want to demonstrate to admissions officers of our growth over time.

Here’s an example of a good way you can write about the effects of Depression in your college essay.

Negative effects of Depression (obstacles presented):

Made it difficult to feel motivated.
Lowered your grades in school.
Couldn’t stay focused due to negative emotion.
Brought upon turmoil in family life.

Positive effects of Depression (ways in which you’ve grown):

Originally had crippling shyness, but overcame it.
Started off with no real goals, but led yourself self-discovery.
Couldn’t find meaning in your life, but became more connected with spiritual self over time.
Learned to overcome hardships such that future ones will not be too hard.

The key takeaway here is that these effects are typically all negative, and that makes sense. Depression typically doesn’t have positive effects. However, we want to turn our negative into a positive by demonstrating how the effects of Depression underscore our positive attributes. Sometimes it highlights our ability to overcome unbearable emotional strain, or it helps us mature faster than we could have otherwise.

With all this positivity, let’s tackle one of the big questions? Does Depression justify low grades? Or, will the college admissions officers judge my grades similarly to others without Depression?

Here it is; the question we’ve all been waiting for: does depression justify low grades in the college admissions process? Like most things in this world other than physics and the IRS, it depends.

If you are formally diagnosed with Depression, the admissions officers will certainly take extra consideration into your application. They may be more lenient on your grades, especially if you explain how Depression affected the lower grades in your classes. However, you need to be specific. If your Depression negatively impacted your performance in your AP Chemistry class, write about that in your college essays!

It is important, however, that you do not use Depression as a scapegoat for your insufficiencies. This would include using it to pick straws at reasons you underperformed instead of providing a valid reason.

If you were not diagnosed with Depression but have suffered extreme hardship to the degree that you’ve had symptoms similar to Depression, you will need to write that in your essay. However, note that you won’t have a formal diagnosis backing you up in your college apps. As such, you will need to approach your essays with extra caution.

We highly recommend getting hyper specific about the details of your Depression. If you can articulate the details behind your Depression as well as what may have started it, you may help the admissions officers see a clearer image of why your grades suffered. We’ve seen many times when our clients did not seem to have a good explanation for their lower grades. However, their explanation after 2-3 calls justified their grades much more.

Write About How Overcoming/Coping With Depression Makes You a Suitable Candidate.

So, Depression itself does not automatically make you a suitable candidate for university. It may help admissions officers understand more about you, and even have more sympathy for shortcomings in your academic performance. However, we don’t just want to settle with a good college application. We want something great; it needs to stand out amongst the rest.

To do this, you’ll need to talk about your experience overcoming and coping with Depression. By writing your college essay about Depression and your journey overcoming it, you will share valuable character traits with the admissions officers. Your path to overcoming Depression serves as a reminder that you are working at a disadvantage compared to other students. It also shows that you are capable of withstanding great pressure and bearing with it.

Roughly speaking, you need to find a narrative that weaves in your strong traits that come as a result of your depression. Let’s take a look at a few examples below.

Examples of how writing your college essay about Depression and overcoming it can be strong:

After having lost many friends transitioning into a new school, I sunk into a deep Depression. I’ve learned, however, how to make friends in a new and scary situation. Overcoming my Depression gave me the strength of character to become brave; this bravery helped me make new friends, and I hope to do the same at Vanderbilt University.
The struggles of living in a strictly conservative household made self expression as a woman impossible. I sunk into a deep Depression, and had to learn how to discover my own version of femininity outside the bounds of their conventional ideals. This meant having to stand up for myself despite great fear. Despite my Depression making me quiet and obedient, I found that my overcoming it made me strong enough to both become more independent and discover my own version of femininity. My journey is far from over, though. I would like to continue this path to self development at the University of California.
I used to think of myself as a person guided by logic alone, someone who worshipped the logos. “I don’t get emotional, it’s pointless.” and “There’s no point in being sad.” were common philosophies. It wasn’t until I started to listen to the works of Dr. Alok Kanojia that I discovered my “logical mind” was really a coping mechanism for feeling emotion. Ever since being traumatized by my negative relationship with my narcissistic step-mother, I shut off all emotion in an attempt to immunize myself from the pain. This coupled with her irrationality made me gravitate toward logic and reason as a safe space from her abuse. When I discovered this in my mental substructure, my psyche was split in two: I had my logical and emotional brain. In my journey overcoming Depression, I also rekindled my relationship with my emotional self. This helped me become less robotic, and even helped me perform better in my academics overtime –hence the upward trend from sophomore through junior year. Should I be accepted into the University of Southern California, I will certainly translate my newfound knowledge into my academics here.

In all of these examples, we’ve used Depression to underscore the positive attributes in an applicant. The act of overcoming Depression, or at least coping with it, can highlight many strong characteristics. Just remember to emphasize that you are an emotionally stable and functioning adult when writing your college essay about Depression, as that will be a major factor that can make or break your application.

“Rain. Rain. Go away; or, so I’d normally think. Except, there was nothing more comforting than the sound of rain. It was August. It was a strange time for heavy rain, but blessed during such a dry time nonetheless. California could use it. I am the only son of both a lawyer and a nurse. I was conditioned for what they considered success since I could remember. I never had to worry about what clothes to wear nor what food to eat. I had everything in life. Yet, in some outrageous act of irrational ingratitude, I still find myself struggling with depression. I wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis; yet, I was. My mother and father were caring and understanding with the utmost empathy. I had everything. My family didn’t even give me the quintessential ‘just get over your depression’ that so constitutes commonplace family psychology. They were right. They handled everything as they normally should. I had nothing to blame. I only had my privilege and my depression. So, why was I like this? I was depressed because rain falls. It was the rain during that hot, humid, rain in California. My family and I were on a roadtrip that took us to a small town with cute shops, overpriced hemp goods, and boba shops. My family stopped by a coffee shop, and I took the time to get distracted by a tiny bookstore. I opened a copy of a piece titled ‘The Portrait of a Lady’. I thought maybe if I stared off into space for effect, maybe it would qualify my depressiveness and perhaps validate my sadness. It didn’t. I thought perhaps my book could distract me. It didn’t. The rain grew louder. It was beginning to pour. I stared out the window. Asymmetrical droplets left traces of water in inconsistent patterns across a see-through canvas, leaving transparent streaks. Why did it even matter? Why did I care? Why would I not? Then, in that instance of moment of critical introspection, it did not dawn on me. Nope. I didn’t become enlightened by rain like what happens in a haiku. Nothing happened. The rain didn’t even have any sort of magical effect. It just… rained. It rained because that’s all rain can do and was made to do. And, it shouldn’t have to be anything. It just is. Just like my depression, there is neither why nor could nor ought to be. I just happen to be depressed as rain just happens to fall. And, like rain, so too will my depression pass and let forth sunlight once again.” Example College Essay About Depression

Writing your college essay about depression is not easy. It’s a contentious topic, which is why we highly recommend speaking with a college admissions essay expert. Contact us for a free consultation , and our admissions essay experts will get back to you within 24 hours.

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Should I write my essay on facing depression?

Hi! Current junior here. I’ve been thinking about college applications and was wondering-- would writing an application essay about overcoming depression look like a sob story, or should I go for it?

The thing is, my grades in freshman and sophomore year weren’t great (a couple of B’s), and I’m hoping to get into an Ivy League (mainly Cornell). I’m worried that if I write about my depression during those years, I’ll sound like I’m trying to make an excuse for those low grades. I’m definitely not, though. Overcoming depression was a huge part of my life and I really feel like it would be a good representation of me and my experiences.

So, what do you think? Would writing an essay about depression be too morbid or look like I’m fabricating some sob story to cover up my bad grades? Or will colleges be glad to see this about my life experiences?

Some other factors (just in case):

GPA UW: 3.8 SAT: 2310 tons of great EC’s (lots of leadership) and clubs and volunteer work

Generally speaking, college admission officers do not want to read about how the death of your pet goldfish impacted your life.

IF you can handle the essay with extreme care, I say go for it. YOU determine the most memorable events (or lack thereof) in your life. Unless you reevaluate what you want to write for your personal statement down the path, start gathering key moments during the time of depression, and make sure that you devote the liberal part of your essay on how you persevered and how this strengthened you .

I’m not an admissions officer, so I may be completely wrong. But if it were me, I’d keep away from that, The last thing that school in particular needs is someone who may be prone to depression. There is a horrible (though unfair) reputation for people jumping off bridges there that they are rather keen to overcome.

Additionally if you may be prone to depression I do not recommend that school for you. You will be tested there, and will not alwys be happy. And it is overcast a lot there, which may not be helpful to some prone to depression.

Again, this is just my off-the-cuff, and non-expert, opinion.

I don’t think depression would look like you are fabricating some story to make up for your grades dropping, because honestly, if you have a 3.8UW, I don’t think your grades are all that bad. I agree with the second part of what viphan said, just emphasize how you overcame this and grew as a person.

The only thing I would be wary of is that students are often advised to steer clear of mental health related topics because some colleges view them as a liability then (potential relapse in college could mean them spending money on you in the student health center, or you not graduating, which also looks bad). I’m not sure if this is true, and if it is, it is a sad state of affairs, but it may be worth keeping in the back of your mind. Maybe someone with more knowledge than me will come along and shed some more light on this topic.

Also @viphan‌, maybe I just missed the humor in the first part of your comment (very possible), but if you are comparing depression, a serious mental illness, to losing a pet goldfish, that’s a very inaccurate and borderline offensive comparison. Depression, as I’m sure the OP can attest to, is not like grief. It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain leading to feelings of deep sadness and hopelessness that are very difficult to shake.

I would caution against it. The issue isn’t that it will sound like a sob story. Mental illnesses, and especially depression, have a stigma in college admissions because adcoms might worry that you could relapse, especially since going to college is a big change that can lead to stress, homesickness, etc. on its own (and I never thought I would face depression again after three years of calm, but here I am). Especially if your stats are borderline, they might choose someone who is “healthy” over someone who might not succeed academically, take a leave, drop out, etc. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been in remission; you really don’t want to label yourself that way. Consider that Cornell has a reputation for having a high suicide rate (however true or untrue that actually is). Mentioning depression would be risky.

Definitely, though, let your guidance counselor mention it in his/her recommendation letter (and even then, it’s safer to mention some vague illness or “difficult circumstances” instead of uttering the d-word). And IDK, your stats may be good enough to not even mention it (I think your GPA’s around average for their class?).

I get what you’re saying about it being a major part of your identity; I feel the same way. But what you think is an asset may be perceived as a liability, and you don’t want to take that chance.

Well, it wasn’t the death of my goldfish. It was a lot of different factors (cue epic sad backstory: my parents used to be farmers and now they’re at 200k+/year income so there are HUGE expectations for me, I developed eating disorders, super high-pressure school, three suicides in one year, etc.).

I’m thinking about stressing how much I learned from depression and how I’ve recovered from it. I’m a-okay now and healthy and happy, but I understand that colleges will be wary of relapses. I think I’ll go for it but like y’all said, keep the topic delicate and stress how much it’s impacted me, but also how much I’ve developed and learned from it.

Like @viphan‌ said, if you can write the essay in a delicate way, go for it. As long as you avoid any morbid/sad “poor me” content, I think you’ll be okay. The most important thing is to focus less on the depression itself and focus more on how it HELPED you. Sure, it’s a gray sky and life but you have to show that light at the end of the tunnel. You have to show your resilience and let the adcoms understand your character by demonstrating how you’re better for it all.

Your essay is a tool for marketing yourself to the college. Is this really the top thing you want them to know about you? I doubt… I am sure it is cathartic for you to write about depression, but save it for a journal or writing that is not for the eyes of admissions. Anything that makes it seem like you are at risk of any kind of mental health issues is a red flag for admissions. To you it may seem like ages ago and like it has been overcome, but to an adult, a year or two is the blink of an eye – and they also know that this can definitely recur, even if you think you have it licked. They are looking for reasons to put applications in the reject pile at schools that get way more applications than they can accept. Don’t give them a reason.

I am a college admissions coach and I think you should go for it. Be careful about the tone of the essay and make it positive in a sense that you explained how you have changed due to that experience. If you want me to point you to resources, let me know.

As another adult here, I agree with @intparent that you should choose something else about yourself to write about. Admissions may worry about a relapse. I understand that it was a big part of your life, but I am sure that there are other facets of your personality or experience that you can also write about.

Please note that there is a separate forum for College Essays and this has been much discussed topic over the years (use search.) Pretty much every expert you will find says no, do not use this topic, it is TMI. There is always an exception to the rule and I have read a great essay (that worked) on someone with an eating disorder but that person, I would note, was the class Val and it was 5 years before. Eating disorder is another thing to generally leave out. Aside from the view of risk factor and not selling yourself I personally think there is only so much there is to say. Almost every story of this type sounds the same and follows the same pattern. And believe it they have already read every variation. I think it is especially craven to be trying to explain away a couple of trivial B’s. Suck it up, you got a couple of B’s, it won’t keep you out of anywhere, but not having an interesting essay might.

Please take this lightly but —OMG Cornell has enough problem trying to shake the image of gorge jumpers, although they do not actually have a higher rate of student suicides than other colleges. I can imagine them with a money jar where they have to put a quarter in every time one of the adcoms gets a depression essay. Think–if it is the most important thing in your life to write about, will it be clear you are over it? I think you are over it when you don’t have to write about it, that you have another life brimming with things you must share. And do not think for a minute your protestations of how everything is behind you can be relied upon. How can the adcom make the decision that you are well enough to attend, with imperfect information, without medical affirmation. So proceed if you must but know that this is risky and not unique. Be sure you have some colleges on your list that don’t require essays.

Okay, @kalefornia‌, let’s be certain I understand this. Your family evolved from farming to an annual income that’s in the top (probably) three percent of Americans; fundamentally, that’s why you were (are?) depressed.

The same application “reader” (at Cornell or at other most-selective National Research Universities) that evaluates your essays will also review MANY others from applicants whose problems are not caused by real affluence, but rather by abject poverty, and/or by acute and documented physical and mental problems, and/or by actual disfunction families, and/or by extreme lack of opportunities, and so forth. Now, please put yourself in the place of this admissions staffer, imagine how sympathetic you’d feel, and then estimate how your essay would be scored.

Find another topic and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

@kalefornia , I think it’s a weak topic. The Adcom has probably been depressed at some point himself/herself and will be bored stiff with this topic. Depression is very common and–this is harsh, but honest-- as a reader I don’t care how your feelings changed you. What I care about is how you function in the world and how you are going to impact my campus. Write your essay, and rewrite it, and get it out of your system, and move on to a topic that will make readers feel “I want that kid here now!” This does not have to be some grand life changing experience. An Adcom told my D that the best essay she ever read was about how the kid liked to wear a new pair of socks every day. It’s not an important topic, but the writer really conveyed how creatively he thinks and that’s what they wanted to see. They couldn’t put it down.

@TopTier Okay, I don’t want this to turn into a pissing contest, but have you ever been depressed yourself? If you have, you’d understand that depression isn’t something that can be based off how rich or poor your parents are. To assume that that’s all there is to the story is plain ignorance. I’d rather not go into the details online, but you can rest assured that I’m not “feeling sorry for myself”. To be honest, it’s ridiculous and almost laughable that you think depression is only justified for people in “abject poverty”.

@redpoodles I totally understand where you’re coming from. However, you made one point: “the adcoms don’t care how my feelings changed me”. I’m a bit confused-- isn’t this the whole point of the essay?? To show that I’m more than some numbers and statistics? I get that the small things are just as worthwhile to write about, but does that necessarily mean I shouldn’t write about bigger things? In any case, thank you for your input. You made a lot of good points.

@kalefornia I won’t tell you what to write about, but I will tell you my personal experience. As someone who faced depression and various other things, I was extremely tempted to write my essay about that; overcoming it truly did change me as a person. As for college admissions, I don’t think it is advantageous to do so. I wrote about 5 different essays and eventually went with one that put forth the most confident, suave, and happy version of myself- but I managed to make it all organic and passionate by addressing things that got me out of my depression while not mentioning said depression.

Writing about and reflecting on your depression is very soothing, but adcoms generally prefer a more positive essay. Good luck to you whatever you choose!

@kalifornia , clearly, you should write this essay. it’s burning to come out of you. do write it, and make it the best you can. then, like cakeandtears, write three others, because they will follow after you get that one out. you have plenty of time, and next year, as you’re filling out your applications, you will be in the best position possible–you’ll have several thoughtful essays to pull from. best of luck to you. and you’re right, depression (and addiction) can happen to anybody.

No! The point of the essay is to make them WANT you on campus. The point of the essay is to get admissions to say “yes, that person adds some spark or special interest to our student body”. I think students forget that admissions officers don’t really know you… all they get is this tiny slice of you that shows up in the components of your application. I am sure there is something more positive and interesting in your life that you can write about. But I get the sense you have already written the essay, and now just want to defend it. We do see students do this all the time out here. Sometimes they can’t be dissuaded. Just know that this does not make for the strongest application that you can put forward.

It may be “burning to come out of you”, but you do not have to write your college essay about it. Blog, journal, submit it to a magazine, whatever. But it isn’t a great topic for admissions.

@kalefornia‌ (re post #13 ): By all means, write an essay that indicates that concurring your depression has shaped your life, but be prepared when those who evaluate your essay question its legitimacy (due to your circumstances in comparison to the challenges faced by many others) AND find nothing in it that compels them to admit you.

@intparent‌ (re post #16 ): Spot-on, excellent advice.

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Is writing about depression and anxiety in college essays considered a cliché? Answered

From the perspective of college admissions officers, I often wonder if it is a boring and commonly written-about subject that students should refrain from writing about. I, myself, have an essay written about mental health struggles, but I'm afraid that it might be put to the side due to its topic alone. Any thoughts?

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This can either go two ways: one where you just talk about your depression and anxiety, and one where you talk about what you did to overcome the challenges from your depression and anxiety. You are aiming for that second option, as colleges are looking to see how you perform in spite of difficult challenges.

I actually brought up my depression in my main college essay as well. However, instead of just focusing on that and how I felt during that time, I instead focused on how I overcome that depression. I started taking part in extracurricular activities, I was part of leadership and helped my school as much as possible, and much more. Focus on those things than just talking about your struggles.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you want me to explain it more!!

Hi, I really appreciate the response! I would like to tie it to my participation in programs that help to make mental health accessibility easier for others. Would that be an example of overcoming my struggles and writing in a way that is beneficial for my application?

What exactly did those programs do to you to help you with your journey through dealing with depression and anxiety? That is what colleges are looking for - what you did to conquer those challenges.

I would say it entirely depends. Speaking about mental health in general may well be considered a cliché, but the entire point of a college essay is to be personal to you. If you are able to expand on your own personal mental health struggles and be specific as to how this has affected your own life, how you have grown, etc., it could still be a fantastic essay.

sorry, but do not recommend that topic. depression and anxiety are common health conditions (not to make light of your health condition, but super common), and it could make you seem fragile and/or self absorbed and not mature if you pick that topic. I appreciate you are tyring to be authentic and vulnerable in an essay, but you are so much more than your anxiety or depression. it would not make you stand out as unique ... that alone might get you put aside. No doubt you have way more interesting stories to tell about yourself.

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COMMENTS

Should you discuss mental health issues in your college essay?
Yes, of course, but they are rare. In all the time I did college admissions work, I had exactly one student successfully discuss anxiety in an essay. It was, however, introduced in the context of a family tragedy that had profoundly shaped the student's life; given that background, the discussion seemed natural and matter of fact rather than ...
How to Address A Mental Health Issue or Disability On Your College
If your struggles with mental health or disabilities are defining features of this nature, then your essay is a great place to frame them positively. If you choose to do so, focus extensively on your recovery or management of these issues, and stress your ability to overcome the challenges you have faced. Never leave an admissions committee to ...
Should You Talk About Mental Health in College Essays?
Mental health is an important part of your well-being, and it's essential to start good habits in high school. This way, you'll be better prepared to cope when you face new challenges in college. You'll likely be experiencing living on your own for the first time and have new responsibilities without the same support system that you had ...
College essay on depression
Any insights would be appreciated. Writing about depression in your college essay can be a powerful and meaningful way to share your personal experiences and reflect on your growth. However, it's essential to approach the topic thoughtfully and carefully, as mental health is a sensitive subject. 1. Focus on growth and resilience: Instead of ...
Should I Mention Depression on My College Application?
Rubenstone, who served as Emily's counselor in the admissions process, says, "Colleges can run scared when they hear the word depression. " Emily, who got treatment, hoped colleges would pay ...
Talking about Mental Health in Your College Admissions Essay
The short answer is, no, generally not. Because college essays are so brief—the Common App personal statement is only 650 words, about a page and a quarter—students should use the limited space in their college essays to highlight. their strengths. Given how prevalent mental health issues are, having a mental health disorder is unlikely to ...
Mental Health in College Students
Thankfully, these are, of course, extreme cases of mental health challenges. However, the shift in focus could benefit the massive numbers of students who enter college each year with depression/anxiety. According to a survey by the CDC in 2022, 44% of American adolescents report feeling persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 28% said ...
How to Discuss Your Mental Health on College Applications
The Additional Information Section. All of the college planners mentioned above agree that if your mental health struggle in high school clearly impacted your performance, then you should mention it in the "Additional Information" portion of the Common Application — but only in a factual manner. If you missed three months of your ...
Mention depression in your college essay? (yes or no)
In case you wish to mention depression in your college essay here are some reasons why you should: It impacted your high school experience. Your academic performance suffered. To explain a gap year or period. You wish to highlight how you overcame it. To show how you turned your weakness into your strength.
Should I write about my mental health struggles in my college essay?
8 months ago. Writing about mental health challenges can be a deeply personal and meaningful topic for your college essay, but you're right to consider the potential implications. If you decide to write about your mental health journey, it's important to focus primarily on the growth and resilience you've demonstrated despite your challenges.
Depression: Should I Talk about My Mental Illness in My Application?
Your main essay should reflect the wonderful qualities that you bring to any college campus, not only your depression. A statement about your treatment for depression is usually most appropriate for the Additional Information section on the Common Application, or for a supplemental essay in a college's own portion of the application. Keep the ...
Should I discuss my mental health struggles in my college essay?
If it has, then it may be worth discussing in your essay. However, if there are other experiences or aspects of your life that better define you, you might want to focus on those instead. If you do decide to write about mental health, make sure to emphasize your growth, coping strategies, and the support systems that have helped you overcome ...
Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?
Yes. No. Top. Mental health struggles can create challenges you must overcome during your education and could be an opportunity for you to show how you've handled challenges and overcome obstacles. If you're considering writing your essay for college admission on this topic, consider talking to your school counselor or with an English ...
Should I "Recall" My Common App Essay on Depression?
Once you've submitted your Common Application essay, it's usually a bad idea to write to colleges to say "Never mind." This conveys a message to the admission committees that suggests, "I didn't put adequate thought into my initial try, so now I expect you to take extra time to deal with a non-standard situation."
Addressing Depression in Your Personal Statement
At other times, the feelings that come with depression are inevitable. Depression, for me, is hopelessness. My biggest struggle with depression is not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel; therefore, this way of thinking has caused me to feel unmotivated, alone, and frightened. Because of this, I have spent endless nights ...
Opinion
In their essay, they wrote frankly about depression, anxiety and shame after their mom's cancer diagnosis and eventual death — providing context for why they "did not look like what was ...
My college application essay was about mental health
In my college admissions essay, I wrote about the mental health struggles I experienced in middle school. Born and raised in a low-income household in Queens, I attended public school until I was ...
Writing Your College Essay About Depression
We'll get to that in the next 3 points below. Don't Just Write About Depression. Write About The Effects. If you want to write your college essay about Depression without turning the admissions officers away, you need to write about the effects Depression had on you. This can encompass both the negative effects (obstacles it presented to ...
Should I write my essay on facing depression?
Unless you reevaluate what you want to write for your personal statement down the path, start gathering key moments during the time of depression, and make sure that you devote the liberal part of your essay on how you persevered and how this strengthened you. monydad February 25, 2015, 2:16am 3.
Can I write about mental health in my college essay?
8 months ago. Hello! Writing about your experiences with mental health can be a powerful and meaningful topic for a college essay, as long as you approach it carefully. Colleges appreciate when students are open and honest about their personal experiences, as it shows resilience and personal growth. It's important to focus on how you've ...
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The best essays have clear, coherent language and are free of errors. The story is clearly and specifically told. After drafting, take the time to revise and polish your writing. Seek feedback ...
Should I write my common app essay about how being depressed ...
r/ApplyingToCollege is the premier forum for college admissions questions, advice, and discussions, from college essays and scholarships to college list help and application advice, career guidance, and more. ... I wanted to write about either my depression or anorexia inspired me to pursue medicine as a career, but decided against it because ...
Is writing about depression and anxiety in college essays considered a
Speaking about mental health in general may well be considered a cliché, but the entire point of a college essay is to be personal to you. If you are able to expand on your own personal mental health struggles and be specific as to how this has affected your own life, how you have grown, etc., it could still be a fantastic essay. sorry, but do ...
Should I write about depression in my college essay
If your essay means to demonstrate your knowledge/interests in a relevant field (e.g. psychology), then mentioning depression in your essay doesn't sound problematic to me. I won't do it scientifically though I will write something like what depression feels like metaphorically and in a way anyone can understand.