Trigger Warning – brief references to suicide

Calling Ridge High School “toxic” wouldn’t be a question, it would be a statement of fact. 

The toxicity spews out from the way we re-calculate our grades any moment we get the chance – punching numbers into calculators and refreshing Genesis at addiction-level rates. It rises the moment we ask one another “How many APs are you taking next year?” and then change our schedules when we hear that the next person is taking more than us. Toxicity coats the halls, a result of constant pressure and workloads that are simply higher than most other schools. 

And it’s taking a toll. 

To begin with, students aren’t getting sufficient amounts of sleep, something that, while we pretend can be fixed with a couple of Red Bulls, has significant effects on brain development. We can ignore the fact that the recommended amount of sleep (8-10 hours) is about 4-6 hours higher than what many of my friends average, but note that these recommendations are created by top scientists in the world [1]. 

This venomous culture takes an immense toll on mental health. We often joke about Ridge having the worst mental health in the nation, but the truth is, our predictions might not be that far off.  Students are overwhelmed, burnt out, suffering from severe anxiety and depression, and collapsing.

It’s no longer the “Oh it’s high school — they have just got to push through it”, it’s the “Oh, it’s Ridge High School — how many students will come close to killing themselves just to get a good grade?” Everything is for one number (that golden GPA) and lives are lived just for a chance to get into a top college. 

It’s not a joke anymore. Students are simply not okay. 

And there’s research to back it up:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranks excessive pressure to excel at the same level as poverty, trauma, and discrimination as factors hurting adolescent wellness [2]. In a 2021 study, psychologist Suniya Luthar found “students from affluent schools are suffering from higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and anxiety – as much as three times the national norm” [3]. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that in 2021, 1 in three of the nation’s students experienced poor mental health and one in five seriously considered attempting suicide [4]. 

If the research has shown us that toxic achievement culture is harmful, why do we continue to delude ourselves into thinking it’s somehow okay? At what point will it finally become “bad” enough that we start to change things?

Because I would argue that it’s already “bad” enough. 

Some may cite the school’s new mental health program, saying that we’re heading towards change, but just as band-aids don’t fix bullet holes, these programs merely hide away from the core problem. Teaching students that they have a circle of support doesn’t change the fact that they are willing to sacrifice their lives to get an A+. Teaching students that they have people to go to doesn’t change the fact that students don’t know how to cope with anxiety, let alone reduce factors that can trigger it. 

Doesn’t it seem a little ironic that our mental health curriculum teaches students what to do if they think their friend is suicidal, but it doesn’t teach us how to reduce pressure in our own lives? It’s like we’ve accepted that everything is horrible and moved on. 

Why?

One part of the issue can come from larger expectations. Especially in a school comprised of many first and second generation immigrants, the idea that working hard is the only way path to success has been ingrained into many of our minds. However, this pressure can easily become excessive. Many of us have heard friends talking about parents who push them to pursue a certain career or push them to join/take thousands of extracurriculars and classes they don’t enjoy. The sole reason: admittance into a top tier school. However, criticism from parents is correlated with high levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and anxiety, alongside lessened amounts of sleep and higher chances of insomnia, which in turn negatively impact mental health [5, 6]. As a result, academic performance tends to go down, with students with controlling parents reporting the lowest levels of academic self-efficacy [7].

There’s even a term for this type of parenting – other-oriented perfectionism, or a sense of perfectionism where parents project their unrealistic expectations outward and onto their children [8]. As a result, kids internalize these unrealistic expectations, forgetting what they want, and developing perfectionism themselves, only for the cycle to repeat. Consequently, Perfectionism in Childhood and Adolescence: A Developmental Approach found that one in three children and adolescents now suffer from some maladaptive form of perfectionism [9, 10]. 

Conversely, these studies cite that it larger societal competitiveness and individualism causes hyperactive parenting. As Rebecca J. Rosen, a senior editor at The Atlantic, explains, “pressure on kids may come from parents, but it’s the result of systemic forces so much bigger and so much more powerful than anything any household has control over” [11]. For instance, within the United States, social mobility is at an all-time low, and the competiton for a few top spots have reached all-time highs. To move up on the socioeconomic ladder or get a high-paying job, a high-level education can be the key. However, with top-tier schools having their lowest acceptance rates ever reported, the boiling pot of academic pressure only continues to get hotter. 

Moreover, this societal pressure doesn’t just materialize from parents — students also put this pressure on themselves, tying their self worth to their grades and test results. Not only does this reflect the larger normalization of the acheivement culture, but proves that students have internalized the pressure they’ve been exposed to ever since they entered the district. 

However, the truth remains that students don’t need to go to an Ivy League to meet some arbitrary conception of sucess or be happy. Sucess doesn’t mean being the best in everything, and it is completley meaningless if students are ruining their lives to get there. This cutthroat competition for top spots isn’t necessary when there are millions of other ways to be “sucessful”. 

This is the message that needs to be pushed out — not that academic excellence is everything, but rather that students should do what makes them happy. That’s not to say that people should stop working hard or cut back on everything, instead, it’s important to recongize that there is a point where this becomes unsustainable. Re-drawing priorities isn’t something we can all avoid — it’s something we all must do. 

Students should be living their lives and enjoying time with friends. They should be able to get away from the pressure and take classes of their choice. GPAs and college resumes shouldn’t be the only things to hold meaning, and this level of pressure shouldn’t be normalized. 

Ridge High School needs to change, and its time we started acknowledging that.

Sources

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.833786 

[2]https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2018/06/inspiring-and-powering-the-future–a-new-view-of-adolescence.html 

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/helping-students-cope-with-the-pressure-to-succeed/ 

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm 

[5] https://www.salon.com/2021/09/12/other-oriented-perfectionism-parenting/ 

[6] https://bau.edu/blog/effects-of-parental-stress-on-students/ 

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8978325/ 

[8] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2022/03/parental-expectations-perfectionism 

[9] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-48372-001 

[10] https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionism-Childhood-Adolescence-Developmental-Approach/dp/1433833093 

[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/pressure-affluent-parents/417045/ 

[12] https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-particular-misery-of-college-admissions-tiktok