INCLUSION
Anxiety Disorders and Academic Debate: Societal Problems and Community Solutions — by Grant Brown —
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nxiety disorders are increasingly prevalent in the 21st century, finding an especially strong foothold in high school aged students. 1 Currently, approximately one in four children aged 13 to 18 will experience one or more of a wide variety of anxiety disorders, including but not limited to post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, and phobias. 2 This has produced a culture that is heavily influenced by anxiety, angst, and stress as a normalized part of its identity. The result is a kinship, of sorts—especially in academically demanding schools and activities such as debate—bonding around mental illness as a site of common experience. While there cannot be a clear causal line from which we can trace the source of the increase in mental illness, there are many larger societal factors that can be extrapolated as contributors and ought to be examined. This begins with a simple fact that awareness of mental illness has been increasing steadily due to increased concern on behalf of schools, institutions, and the general public. This positively correlates with an increase in diagnoses as students become aware of symptoms in both themselves and others and seek treatment. This presents a reasoned argument to dissuade one from alarmist reactions to the presented statistics. Additionally, high school has increasingly shifted to base curriculum geared toward college preparation, which heightens a sense of competitiveness
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in teenage students. This school trend, and once again, anxiety itself, have been bolstered by an almost hallmark decrease in college acceptance rates,3 which normalizes unhealthy levels of commitment, involvement, and participation as part-and-parcel of being a proper student.
“Debate provides a dual potential for students with anxiety—on one end offering an outlet, and on the other an additional source of stress.” Debate presents, ultimately, a kind of catch-22. Students who are driven to attempt to achieve these idealized, general characteristics are often the same students who join debate. They are internally motivated, hard-working, and driven to succeed. The activity is thus incredibly alluring to those who struggle with anxiety (and/or obsession): it gives a sense of community to which one can belong, advertises an ability to better oneself socially, academically, and personally, and presents an outlet to channel racing-thoughts, obsessions, and compulsions into a rigorous and scholarly pursuit. However, a variety of students with anxiety in debate have expressed
that it can also be incredibly destructive: it is structured around cut-throat competition, demands high amounts of research in a short amount of time, and can quickly become consumptive of all of one’s free time. This gives debate a dual potential—on one end offering an outlet, and on the other an additional source of stress. Therefore, the activity, more than most, is faced with addressing issues of mental health. As educators, judges, and peers, we have unique roles to play in ensuring that the space of debate is inclusive and accessible for those with anxiety related struggles. Coaches have a special place in the lives of debaters, simultaneously serving as an authority figure, mentor, and role model. This gives coaches, as educators, a great deal of power in how they can interact interpersonally with struggling students and shape a larger team culture. With regard to interpersonal interactions, coaches need to be leery of a common problem when approaching a student with anxiety: instantly alienating a student by rejecting their self-image. Anxious students are heavily invested in the current social ethos of what it means to be successful, 4 sometimes obsessively, and an attempt to bulldoze their constructed identity is both ineffective and dangerous. Approaching a student with responses that perceptually demean the authenticity of their experience, asserting that they are