Anxiety and Stress

Abstract

Youth is a struggle. Torn between social desires to conform and yet to be original, pressed by the physical demands of a maturing soma on an immature psyche, and stressed further by the competition of an academic life should in the case of students- it is hardly surprising that there should be psychological casualties amongst those who find themselves privileged by further education. The office boy and the shop girl have problems enough with their parental relationships, sexual maturation, struggle for economic independence and role identification, but the student will undergo all these and more. It might be thought to be a small price to pay for the rewards in later life that academic success might bring in terms of career and earnings. There is some reason in this argument, if only from the view that should they survive and succeed then they have proved themselves in the intellectual and personality initiation rites that contemporary society has created for them. Someone who can ‘take on the chin’, as it were, all the stresses of being a student, is someone who will cope with all the stressful demands of a managerial and administrative career in later life without breakdown.