Anxiety and depression have played a big role in my high school life. When my mental health took a downturn, so did my grades and competitive extracurricular performance. I know it’s recommended that your counselor notes things like sickness/family death (if applicable) in their counselor letter, but would mentioning mental health be a red flag for college admissions? Should I even allude to it in my essays?
Don’t waste essay space on excuses or weaknesses, generally.
Although many schools are willing to accept and support mentally ill students, others ( particularly the Ivies/top tier schools) are not. If you wanna do some googling, you’ll see tons of stories about schools trying to expel mentally ill students or coercing them into a voluntary withdrawal. Even if the faculty won’t go this far, they may be worried about accepting a mentally ill student anyway because of suicide concerns- this will make them look bad.
Your counselor can tell adcoms that your dip in performance was due to “health issues” without being obligated to go into further detail. I know it’s really screwed up, but unfortunately there is too much stigma around mental illness for it to be treated the same as cancer, Crohn’s, etc. If you don’t want the risk of being hurt in the admissions process, I wouldn’t talk about mental health specifically.
I suspected that mentioning mental illness would be a big deterrent. Thank you @bodangles and @JadedJunior for your replies.
OP, be thoughtful in your college selection: very few people make it through 4 years of college without periods of stress, anxiety, self-doubt, etc. When making your college list, consider things such as what sorts of safety nets you will have, how academically intense and/or competitive the college is overall, how well prepared you are for the level of academics, whether there are aspects of the college that have been trouble triggers for you in the past and so on.