College Student Mental Health Crisis

Response to: What is Causing the College Student Mental Health Crisis?

Almost a year ago, on February 21, 2014, Dr. Gregg Henriques, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and a blogger of the website Psychology Today wrote a blog post title What is Causing the College Student Mental Health Crisis? or as he refers to it, CSMHC. The articles purpose is to “start a catalog of factors that might be contributing,” to the rising mental health issues in college students in America. He divides his post into three sections with many sub-topics. The post is arranged as follows:

Broad Societal Considerations

We live in the “Age of Anxiety” (and Depression)

The Rapid Evolution of Technology, Information Overload, and Environmental Mismatch

Existential Confusion and the Loss of a Grand Narrative

Economic and Financial Pressures

A Troubled, Ineffective Health Care System

Problematic Attitudes Toward Mental Illness

Psychopharmacology and the Rise of Disease-Pill Model of Mental Illness

A Breakdown in the Traditional Family Structure and Confusion of Roles

General Considerations

A Failure of the Education/Socialization System

Self-Esteem Nation/Nation of Wimps

Generation of Me and the Narcissistic Epidemic

The Emergence of Emerging Adulthood

Considerations Specific to College and University Life

 A Dramatic Transition

Intense Academic Pressures to Succeed

Massively Increased Accessibility to College

Shifting Gender Roles

Poor Handling of (Some) Mental Health Issues of College Campuses

He raises many valid points here. The evolution of technology and social media makes it much easier to have access to potential triggers. Not everyone has a great attitude towards mental health, generating stigma and stopping those in need of help from speaking up. More couples are getting divorced, which can cause psychological issues for the children involved. Not everyone is educated adequately on what mental illness is and how to approach it. Switching to college life is a difficult and stressful task. More students have access to college and therefore there is more potential to have students with mental illness, and many colleges do not handle mental illness appropriately. 

I first want to expand on some of the points Dr. Henriques makes. It is true that switching to college life is difficult and stressful, it is something I have come to equate to how a frog responds to boiling water: if you dump it in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. However, if you put it in the water and then heat it up, the frog will tolerate the high temperature and remain in the water. Thinking of this in terms of the transition to college life and mental illness, imagine that the frog trying to jump out of the pot has a lid blocking it. It has been dumped into something it is not ready for, it is taking a toll on it’s body and no matter how hard it tries it cannot escape and the water wins. That’s what it can be like going through college with a mental illness. The frog that has time to adjust to the water does just fine however. I’m not sure what real life scenario equates to this adjustment, maybe summer camp, or summer programs? Anything that puts a child out of their comfort zone in relation to their living and possibly academic environments that they can build up a tolerance to over the years before beginning college. I’m not saying all students who enter college in the first scenario will have a mental illness, or that all in the second scenario won’t, but I personally believe it’s a contributing factor.

As for how colleges and their counseling centers handle mental illnesses, I have lots of personal experience on the topic. Now I can only speak towards my experience with my school, but I am sure it is not unlike many others. The counseling center at my school is good at their job. It is unfortunate that they are understaffed and sometimes one must wait two weeks to get an appointment, and that they can only handle short term cases, but for what they are capable of doing, they do their job well. The problem at my school lies with the administration. If teachers, residence assistants, or anyone in a position of authority outside of the counseling center hears about suicidal thoughts, self-harm, or an eating disorder, it gets reported to the administration. According to the undergraduate student handbook “such behavior is considered disruptive to the academic and social/living environments of the College community…[and students] may be required to withdraw from the residence hall and/or College.” I understand the school’s want to avoid liability for a student who causes harm to them or even kills themselves, but this method comes at the expense of stigmatizing mental illness and making it something that should neither be heard nor seen, which can make mental illnesses significantly worse.

The main reason I am writing this though, is that I think Dr. Henriques missed one very important point in his piece. The CSMHC and the rise in mental illness worldwide is a result of stigma being broken down. Slowly but surely, the stigma around mental illness is dissolving. People feel more comfortable talking about their mental health and seeking help when something is wrong. Personally, if I had gone to a different high school that didn’t educate it’s students on mental health as well as mine did, or if I had never discovered The War Paint, I would have lived with my depression and anxiety not having words for them, or ever seeking help. I would have let them consume me until I became a shell of my former self. The rise in reported mental illness is not due entirely to how our world has changed to be more triggering (though that may play some role in it), but rather that more people feel comfortable enough to report their illness and seek the necessary support. Think back to when being homosexual was illegal, or when different races were segregated. You could be sent to jail for liking another man, and your parents would not have allowed you to spend time with someone of another color. But the world has changed. It’s not that we now have more LGBTQ people because the world has changed, but that they feel much more comfortable coming out and being themselves. It’s not as though the world has changed to make people of different colors act more (for lack of a better word) “civilized,” but rather that we as a society have grown more comfortable to the idea of interacting with those who are different from us. The answer to the question, Why are college students “showing greater levels of stress, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and poor sleep patterns than any time in [America’s] history?” is not that the world is a harsher place, but actually that is a kinder, more accepting place. It is safer to come forward with a mental illness more so than it ever has been, and people are taking advantage of that to find solutions to their problems. It’s not an epidemic, but rather a growth of society. One that I hope will continue for many more years to come.

- Jack