MOH reports about one in three young people aged 15 to 35 experienced severe symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress. The signs worth noticing, and the real support map.
By Marcus Toh · 2026-03-23
Exam season stress is normal; what deserves attention is persistence and change. The signals counsellors consistently point parents toward: sleep shifting notably in either direction, appetite changing, a sociable child withdrawing from friends or family meals, unusual irritability or tearfulness over small things, physical complaints like headaches and stomach aches clustering on school days, and dark or hopeless language, however casually dropped. One rough week around a paper is exam season. The same signs holding for weeks is a conversation.
The context deserves honesty too: MOH reports that about one in three young people aged 15 to 35 experienced severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress. That is not a statistic about exams or tuition, it is the water our teenagers swim in, and it is why we wrote about burnout as a spending question as much as a wellbeing one.
I see the students the statistics describe, and the pattern that haunts me is how long the signs were visible before anyone named them, months of shrinking appetite and 2am lights explained away as exam season, because the family calendar said stress was appropriate now. Appropriate stress is the camouflage severe stress hides inside, and exam years are where it hides best.
So I ask parents to run one weekly check that costs nothing: not how was the test, but how are you sleeping, and who did you laugh with this week. The answers to those two questions track wellbeing better than any grade, and they keep the door open, which is the whole game, because a child who knows the door is open walks through it weeks earlier. And if your gut says something is wrong, act on the gut, book the counsellor, make the call, because I have never once met a parent who regretted checking too early, and I have met some who regretted the opposite.
Counselling support is a normal school service, and the fear of a mark on the record keeps far more children from help than the service ever inconveniences. If the worry persists, ask the school directly how confidentiality works, and let the answer, not the fear, decide.
Sometimes yes, and we wrote the honest version of that answer: when the schedule itself is the stressor, one fewer commitment is treatment, and any tutor worth keeping will say so themselves.
Keep the door visibly open and route around the block: a trusted aunt, a coach, the school counsellor, or the anonymity of mindline.sg, because the goal is that they talk to a safe adult somewhere, and teenagers often need the somewhere to not be the dinner table first.