The media this morning is reporting some dramatic figures on student mental health. According to Headspace, a youth mental health organisation, two-thirds of students responding to an NUS survey reported high or very high psychological distress over the last twelve months, and a third experienced thoughts of self-harm or suicide.

I’ve recently been doing some reading on this subject, as part of a project on student attrition. I’m convinced there is a problem, but I am not so sure that it is this bad.

The latest ABS National Health Survey from 2014-15 shows that the main student demographic, those aged 18-24, has worse mental health than any other age group. This is only moderately so for men, with 11 per cent reporting high or very high psychological distress on the Kessler scale, compared to 10 per cent for all adult men. But it is dramatically so for women, with 20 per cent reporting high or very high psychological distress, compared to 13.5 per for all adult women.

According to other ABS sources, about half of 18-24 year olds are students. An analysis of an earlier NHS (along with HILDA) found small overall differences between students and non-students, especially after adjusting for demographics, with students being on average younger and more likely to be female than the general population. The NHS survey found 10 per cent of its student sample were experiencing high psychological stress, while it was 21 per cent in HILDA.

One important reason for different results is that the ABS surveys and HILDA ask about mental health issues over the last month, while the Headspace/NUS survey asks about the last twelve months. Mental health issues tend to be episodic, so we should expect more people to experience one over a year than a month. There seem to be widely varying results even from surveys with similar methodologies, so mental health is clearly something that is difficult to measure at a population level. But Headspace/NUS getting triple the rate of the ABS or HILDA seems high. They have not published their detailed results, so perhaps we will have a better idea of why when they do.