To better serve their students, many of the colleges on our 2025 Mental Health Honor Services Honor Roll offer anonymous mental health screenings. These screenings can help students identify and determine the things that might be standing in the way of their personal and academic growth.

Think of a self-assessment as a practical tool that can help you improve yourself. If the comparison helps, think of how you improve your test scores: you look at and identify problem spots, put a plan in place for studying those areas, and then practice applying what you’ve learned until you see the desired growth. The biggest difference is that you’ll be studying yourself instead of a textbook.

 The self-assessment provided below is similar to the one in our College Wellness Guide, where we looked at specific types of health (mental, physical, social, future) and used a Likert scale (4 being “strongly agree” and 0 being “strongly disagree”) to provide helpful insights to incoming students.

Remember that there are no “right” answers—just answer as honestly as you can. Score each question with one of the following and tally your total for each self-assessment:

• Strongly agree = 4 points
• Agree = 3 points
• Neither agree nor disagree = 2 points
• Disagree = 1 point
• Strongly disagree = 0 points

COUNSELING SELF-ASSESSMENT

A high score in this area may indicate that you would benefit from some form of mental health services (like counseling), either individually or in a group.

1. I often avoid situations or people that make me anxious.
2. I often overplay for every scenario to feel more in control.
3. I often focus on the worst-case scenario.
4. I constantly doubt myself.
5. Activities that usually bring me joy don’t provide the same feelings anymore.
6. I feel very sensitive to failure, criticism, or rejection.
7. Academic achievement is more important to me than sleep, friends, or my physical health.
8. I feel like my struggles and setbacks are so encompassing that I feel overwhelmed.
9. I don’t know where to look for help, and I feel a bit lost and alone.
10. I often feel better when I give voice to my struggles.
11. When I have a plan to tackle challenges, I feel much better.
12. When I talk and listen to others, it helps me put my own problems into perspective.
13. I still deal with strong feelings from a past event and would like to learn how to feel more confident in handling those feelings as they arise.
14. I’d like to find strategies to build consistent, healthy habits and learn how to incorporate them into my daily routine.
15. I benefit from hearing others discuss their problems and/or taking workshops based on overcoming my struggles.

• If you score 20 or less, this is probably an area in which you’re feeling fairly confident. (That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still seek out help, especially if your circumstances change, but perhaps you’ll feel more comfortable starting with peer-to-peer offerings or remote, independent workshops or webinars.)
• If you score between 21–40 and can’t identify a specific stressor to work on, or don’t know how to manage things like a lack of sleep or high anxiety, you may benefit from reaching out to your school’s counseling services, especially for a short-term, solution-focused session.
• If you score above a 40, consider reaching out to any of your college’s mental health services sooner rather than later. It is important to establish an action plan—to take charge of your own wellness—as opposed to just waiting in the hopes that things will get better on their own.

You can find more information about your prospective schools with our College Search, and see what some of the schools on our 2025 Mental Health Services Honor Roll are currently providing in terms of mental health services, wellness quality of life, and peer-to-peer resources.

Portions of this article were adapted from the Campus Wellness Guide, published 2021 by Penguin Random House.