Students rating their emotional health revealed the lowest levels since the question was first asked 25 years ago according to a UCLA annual survey of more than 200,000 American college freshman.

The new study highlights the growing concern among educators and physicians about the mental health of American young people. “What it means is that going into college students are already feeling more stress and feeling more overwhelmed and have lower emotional reserves to deal with that stress,” said John H. Pryor, lead author of the report.

This new study is not a surprise to many researchers. A study published in 2000 in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that childhood anxiety has been steadily on the rise since the 1950s. Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University who conducted the study concluded that, “the average American child (today) reports more anxiety than child psychiatric patients did in the 1950s.”

Record numbers of American soldiers are being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since the start of the Iraq war—a debilitating syndrome which these men and women carry with them from the battlefield into civilian life.

But fortunately—and often with the prescription of their physicians—a growing number of these veterans are learning the Transcendental Meditation technique and finding an immediate and long-lasting healing relief from this terrible disorder.

The problem of PTSD among veterans has reached epidemic proportions—with an estimated half million soldiers and veterans suffering form of the syndrome, according to a recent report by the international news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP). Even more shocking, a greater of veterans and soldiers have died by suicide then in combat since the start of the Iraq war.