What are the mental health concerns for international students? Jun 13, 2019 at 12:04 am

Heading off to college can be a stressful time. Students have to learn to live on their own, navigate a new environment, be on top of their academics, and make a brand new set of friends. Now imagine doing all of those things in an alien culture, and not in your native language.



There are 8,670 international students at the University of Washington's three campuses. They come from more than 100 different countries. Thomas Chengxi Zou is one of them. He’s from China, and he is now a graduate student in journalism at the UW. When he arrived in the U.S. last year, he was surprised by how isolating it felt. “Mostly, I felt stress and anxiety from different levels,” Zou said.

For Zou, it was a combination of loneliness, peer pressure, struggles with the language and worries about finding an internship or a job before his visa runs out. Since arriving, he said he's experienced a lot of ups and downs. That led Zou to wonder: What's the mental health status of international students? And how common are his struggles? We get the answer from Natacha Foo Kune, the director of the UW's Counseling Center and a former international student herself.

Credit: KUOW Photo/Deborah Wang