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Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder among college students more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, jumping from 3.4 percent to 7.5 percent, according to new research encompassing five years of data from the Healthy Minds Study. The increase was sharpest during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
In a New York Times report about the finding, Shannon E. Cusack, a psychologist who has studied PTSD in college students, said that researchers in her field had disagreed on whether disruptions young adults experienced during the pandemic constituted traumatic events—which, according to diagnostic criteria, include “death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence.”
“They’re causing symptoms that are consistent with the PTSD diagnosis,” Cusack said. “Am I not going to treat them because their stressor doesn’t count as a trauma?”
The Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University previously found that almost 50 percent of students who attend on-campus counseling reported experiencing a traumatic event. According to the National Center for PTSD, most people experience at least one traumatic event in their lives, but the majority of traumatic events do not lead to developing PTSD.
