# You Can’t Ask for Help With Something You’ve Been Taught to Call Normal 2026-09-20 · Somerset County, New Jersey · Reported Feature Rowan University researcher Sarah Wilson is examining how engineering culture may shape not only student stress, but the language students use to decide whether their own distress counts as something that warrants support. Rowan University researcher Sarah Wilson is examining how engineering culture may shape not only student stress, but the language students use to decide whether their own distress counts as something that warrants sup… --- There is a difference between experiencing something and deciding what to call it. A person can be exhausted without using the word burnout, isolated without describing themselves as lonely, or overwhelmed without deciding that what they are feeling rises to the level of a mental-health concern. The experience happens first. The label comes later. And sometimes the culture around us has already supplied the label before we ever get a chance to choose one ourselves: this is normal, this is what the work requires, everybody feels this way, keep going. That gap between experience and interpretation sits at the center of research being presented Sept. 14 at Cornell University by Sarah Wilson, an associate professor in Rowan University’s Experiential Engineering Education program. Her seminar, “The Environments We Create: How Engineering Culture Shapes Student Mental Health and Support,” examines an unusual pattern in engineering education. Engineering students report comparatively lower levels of depression and anxiety than students in many other academic fields, even though engineering programs are widely associated with substantial workloads and stress. At the same time, engineering students who are experiencing mental-health distress are among the least likely to receive professional help. Those two findings can coexist. They also create a much more interesting question than whether engineering students are simply more or less distressed than everyone else. What if the culture of a discipline influences the threshold at which people recognize distress as distress? What if students become so accustomed to expectations around endurance, productivity and self-reliance that some experiences are interpreted as ordinary costs of belonging rather than signals that something is wrong? Wilson’s work does not reduce the issue to one explanation. The research she is presenting draws on quantitative, qualitative and participatory studies examining engineering student mental health, help seeking and belonging. Across that work, expectations surrounding academic performance, productivity, endurance and self-reliance emerged as important influences on how students understand and respond to mental-health concerns. Those expectations are not delivered through a single policy or orientation speech. They are reinforced through ordinary educational environments: interactions with peers, faculty and advisors, the way workload is discussed, the stories students tell about what successful engineers tolerate, and the quiet social rewards attached to appearing capable under pressure. That matters because a culture does not need to tell people explicitly not to seek help in order to make help-seeking less likely. It can do something subtler. It can change the meaning of the symptoms first. In a 2025 study co-authored by Wilson using data from more than 50,000 students in the national Healthy Minds Study, engineering students were among the least likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety compared with students in other fields. Yet 44.4% of undergraduate engineering students still screened positive for current depression and/or anxiety. Among those who screened positive, only 40.4% had received therapy or counseling in the previous year. Engineering students experiencing distress were also among the least likely to report having received a depression or anxiety diagnosis. Those numbers do not prove that engineering culture causes students to underrecognize their own distress. But the pattern makes the cultural question difficult to ignore. If a population reports lower levels of certain symptoms while also showing low rates of diagnosis and treatment among students who do meet screening thresholds, the next useful question is not simply whether students are struggling. It is how they are deciding what struggle means. That is where engineering becomes a particularly useful case study for a much broader human problem. Every community develops its own vocabulary for discomfort. Some workplaces call chronic overload “being busy.” Some families call emotional suppression “being strong.” Some professions call sleep deprivation “paying your dues.” Some athletic cultures call injury “toughness.” None of those phrases necessarily begins as an instruction to ignore a problem. But repeated often enough, a phrase can become a sorting mechanism. It separates experiences that are allowed to count from experiences that are expected to be absorbed. Engineering education has its own version of that process. A difficult course is supposed to be difficult. A demanding project is supposed to demand something. Deadlines, technical uncertainty, competition and long hours can all be legitimate parts of rigorous training. The problem begins when the normal presence of stress becomes evidence that every form of stress is normal. Once that happens, a student may stop asking, “Is this affecting me in a way that needs attention?” and start asking, “Why am I not handling what everyone else seems to handle?” That is not merely a mental-health problem. It is a language problem with consequences. The words available to describe an experience help determine what actions become imaginable next. If exhaustion is interpreted as weakness, the response is concealment. If isolation is interpreted as personal failure, the response may be more self-reliance. If distress is interpreted as an ordinary feature of engineering, professional support can begin to feel disproportionate, almost as though asking for help requires proving that your suffering has exceeded some unwritten disciplinary threshold. The phrase “serious enough” does a remarkable amount of work in these situations. People rarely need an official rule telling them they are not allowed to seek support. They can disqualify themselves first. Someone else has it worse. The semester is almost over. Everyone is tired. This is just what engineering is like. Each statement can be individually reasonable, and together they can create an environment in which help is always one escalation away from being justified. Wilson’s current research moves beyond asking students to become better at identifying problems inside themselves. Her participatory work has involved engineering students in identifying barriers to mental health and belonging and developing strategies for change. The resulting opportunities distribute responsibility across students, faculty, educational practices, support structures and institutional environments. That is an important shift because the conventional solution to a culture problem is often another instruction aimed at the individual: recognize the signs, practice self-care, use the resources, ask for help. Those things can matter. They are also incomplete if the surrounding environment continues rewarding the behavior that made help feel inappropriate in the first place. A student can be handed a list of counseling resources while remaining embedded in a culture that treats constant availability as commitment, extreme workloads as proof of seriousness and self-sufficiency as professional competence. The resource exists. The social permission to use it may be weaker. This is what makes the research useful far beyond engineering schools. Institutions are very good at counting whether support exists. They are less good at measuring whether the culture makes that support feel usable. A university can have counselors. A company can have an employee assistance program. A hospital can have wellness initiatives. A fire department can have peer support. None of those resources answers the prior question: what has the community taught its members to call normal? If the answer includes exhaustion, isolation, fear of appearing incapable or the expectation that competent people solve their own problems, then the institution may be trying to build an intervention downstream from the language that prevents people from recognizing themselves as eligible for it. There is a certain irony in applying this question to engineering, a field built around examining systems, identifying failure points and redesigning environments so that outcomes do not depend entirely on individual perfection. Wilson describes her own research with a related principle: better systems require attention to the people inside them. The mental-health version of that idea is straightforward. If students repeatedly respond to an environment in the same way, eventually the environment itself belongs in the analysis. That does not mean every demanding classroom should become less demanding or every stressful experience should be medicalized. In fact, the distinction matters precisely because ordinary stress is real and unavoidable. The goal is not to rename every hard week as pathology. It is to make sure a culture does not become so fluent in normalizing difficulty that students lose the ability to distinguish challenge from deterioration. The first barrier to help is not always access. Sometimes it is interpretation. Before a person calls a counselor, tells a professor, talks to a friend or even admits to themselves that something is wrong, they have to decide that what they are experiencing has crossed a line. Communities help draw that line, often without realizing they are doing it. Which is why the most important question in Wilson’s work may not be whether engineering students experience depression or anxiety differently. It may be who taught them what counts. You cannot ask for help with something you have been taught to call normal. If institutions want to change help-seeking, they may have to start earlier than the help desk. They may have to change the language, expectations and everyday environments that tell people when struggle becomes worthy of a name. SOURCE NOTES • Cornell University event listing: https://events.cornell.edu/event/cheme7900-seminar-sarah-wilson-rowan • Whitwer et al., Journal of Engineering Education (2025): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jee.20629 • Sarah Wilson, Rowan University: https://engineering.rowan.edu/faculty_staff/listing/sarah-wilson.html --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.