Rethinking Students’ Mental Health in the Age of AI: Insights into Stress and Anxiety among Undergraduates

Abstract

Student mental health is a critical concern in higher education, with stress and anxiety negatively affecting learning, academic performance, and overall well-being. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into higher education, offering adaptive learning, personalised feedback, and predictive analytics. While AI has the potential to enhance academic support and mental health services through tools such as chatbots, machine learning systems, and digital monitoring, it also introduces challenges, including technostress, dependency, and anxiety. Using Lazarus’s stress and coping theory as a framework, this paper examines how AI acts as both a supportive and stress-inducing environmental factor in student experiences, influencing coping strategies, emotional responses, and mental health outcomes. AI-enabled mental health tools can improve early detection, continuous monitoring, and personalised interventions, but ethical, privacy, and equity considerations are paramount. The findings stress the need for universities to balance AI innovation with human-centred care, fostering digital resilience, promoting responsible AI use, and integrating AI as a complementary tool to support both academic success and student well-being. Recommendations include updating traditional mental health frameworks, designing ethical AI systems, training students in digital resilience, equipping educators to use AI responsibly, and maintaining human oversight in AI-supported mental health services.