Educational stressors and secular trends in school stress and mental health problems in adolescents

Increasing mental health problems among adolescents have been have reported in several countries over the last decades. Yet, little is known regarding the societal changes underlying secular trends in adolescent mental health. The educational stressors hypothesis states that educational expansion and a shift to knowledge economies makes life chances of adolescents more dependent on their educational performance, thus generating more school stress and, in turn, mental health problems. The present study tests this hypothesis using multilevel analyses and panel data techniques to analyse data from the Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey, including more than 150,000 adolescents in 33 European countries over 12 years. Results show that economic change, as measured by changes in national gross domestic product, but not educational expansion, contributes to more school stress in adolescents. Both economic change and educational expansion makes school stress more consequential for mental health problems, such that the effect of stress on mental health problems becomes stronger as countries grow richer and more educated. I conclude that, consistent with the educational stressors hypothesis, economic change and educational expansion has likely contributed to increasing mental health problems in adolescents.