Sharon is 16-years-old now, and life has forced her to develop coping skills, but she feels like if she were younger she wouldn’t be able to handle it. “It’s so different now. Everyone’s always looking over their shoulder, especially in my community,” said Sharon, a high school junior whose parents are Mexican immigrants. “My parents and my brother and I have been followed home from the store by the police and things like that because people get suspicious of us. Apparently people in this country now think that we’re criminals and it’s really sad.”

Sharon, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her safety, lives in a small town in Western New York where she is one of four Latinx juniors at her mostly white high school. When she answered a question wrong in class last week, she said her white English teacher commented, “That was very Mexican of you.”

“I try for school to be my escape from politics, but now I can’t seem to get away from it at school either,” Sharon said. “The day after the election at a school assembly, the students were chanting, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!’”

Like many young people across the country, Sharon has lived with constant fear and anxiety since Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016. The American Psychological Association’s 2018 annual report found that Generation Z — people ages 15-21 — reported the worst mental health of any generation in the United States. Less than half of the young people surveyed reported “very good” or “excellent” mental health. And the report found that current events — such as gun violence, immigration policy and sexual harassment — play a central role in this generation’s increasing stress, which in turn seems to be contributing to deteriorating mental health. The report also found that young people are not getting the support they need, with three quarters reporting that they could have used more emotional support over the past year.

Young people from groups that the Trump administration is targeting — including girls, Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, and Muslim populations — are reportedly experiencing devastating consequences to their emotional and mental wellbeing. “Among students of color and queer communities along lines of gender or sexuality, there’s been a lot of anxiety, hopelessness, fear and feeling more unprotected than ever before,” said Ricky Greenwald, founder and director of the Trauma Institute and Child Trauma Institute, where he specializes in research and trauma care for children and adolescents. “In my networks I’m seeing more suicidality. There’s more of a sense now that it’s never going to be okay.”

Ricky explained that trauma can be caused by major events such as rape or assault, but it can also be caused by the accumulation of harmful experiences over time. When someone has gone through a traumatic event, they can also be triggered and re-traumatized by current events in the news, such as the Kavanaugh hearings or Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.

This everyday traumatization is familiar to Sharon, who has responded by trying to defy negative stereotypes about Mexicans. “Everything I do is so I can show that people like me aren’t what other people say that we are,” said Sharon, who has worked on a farm every summer since she was 12, in addition to being part of Model U.N., student council and youth mentorship. “We aren’t criminals. We aren’t rapists. We aren’t any of that. We’re hard workers.”

And Sharon is not alone. Haleema Bharoocha, a 20-year-old race and gender justice organizer with Malikah and The Greenlining Institute in the Bay Area, has also experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of anxiety, fear and stress she feels on a daily basis. “Starting during the election period was when I felt a shift in my mental health in terms of the trauma, in terms of how tense my shoulders were and what I was carrying with me every day,” said Haleema. “Maybe I’m going to wake up today and something will happen to change my whole life. Maybe there will be legislation that said I’m not allowed to be here anymore... Even now I’m not fully functioning as a person.”