"Your mental health is more important than your grade," is terrible advice.

I see tons of posts here of professors telling their students to not stress about their grades because, "your mental health is more important." This is an incredibly unhelpful and horrible piece of advice that I believe just serves to further reinforce the modern view that your mental health is something that you cannot effect, and is just an inherent part of who you are that you cannot change.<br><br>When someone tells a student who is stressed out that their grades don't matter, or that they should just be happy that they get to go to college, they are making the situation worse. You *do* need to get good grades. You need them to get into a good graduate program, you need them to get a good job, and you need them to pay off the student loans you will have from going to that college in the first place. The attitude that your grades should be at the bottom of your list of concerns is wildly ignorant to the reality that students face, and the mental pressure that this puts on them. In my experience, people who think grades don't matter, or who find it to be unimportant, have never struggled to get good grades. <br><br>The proper way to help students is to make better, more effective coping mechanisms for them. This isn't something that is impossible to change, and the modern attitude that you just can't change your mental health, but rather that you just need to accept it and make it apart of who you are is terrible. This is kind of a Shitty Take, because I don't have a good solution to this. But the advice that, "Your mental health is more important than your grades," is so common, and it never helps.