The Higher Ed Mental Health Crisis

There is no health without mental health; mental health is too important to be left to the professionals alone, and mental health is everyone’s business. ~ Vikram Patel

Let’s set the background, first in America, according to a piece in Time Magazine:

Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000. Almost a third of U.S. adults now report symptoms of either depression or anxiety, roughly three times as many as in 2019, and about one in 25 adults has a serious mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S. adults considered their mental health “excellent,” down from 43% two decades earlier.

And secondly on our college campuses, according to The Clay Center for Young and Healthy Minds:

Mental health issues are increasingly prevalent among college students:

• Almost half of college students had a psychiatric disorder in the past year
• 73% of students experience some sort of mental health crisis during college
• Almost 1/3 of college students report having felt so depressed that they had trouble functioning
• Mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders and substance use are associated with lower GPA and higher probability of dropping out of college
• More than 80% of college students felt overwhelmed by all they had to do in the past year and 45% have felt things were hopeless
• 20% of female students report sexual assault or threatened sexual assault according to the Center for Disease Control
• College directors of counseling services are telling us that there has been a steady increase in the number of students with severe psychological problems and that the demand for counseling services has grown at least 5 times faster than average student enrollment
• Only 25% of students with a mental health problem seek help

To make matters worse:

• There is a tremendous lack of services in colleges and universities: On college campuses, the ratio of certified counselors to students overall is about 1:1000 – 2000 for small to moderate size schools, and 1:2000 – 3500 for large universities.

This is the data, the foundational structure for what is going on at our campuses and in our country. So let me transition to my personal experience. I’ve been working in higher education since 1986. For the last nearly twenty years I’ve worked as a dean, prior to that as an academic advisor for eight years and an instructor for several years before that. Over that time I’ve dealt with many students in moments of crisis. However, the alarming trend that I’ve witnessed over the years has been the increase in moments of crisis I’ve witnessed on a more regular basis.

Particularly as we returned to campus after the pandemic the issue seems to be at an all-time high and the literature backs that up. It seems right now that weekly I encounter another student who is in some form of crisis. This reality ripples through every level of the university. It increases stress on the faculty, other students, the staff and all of the systems’ resources.

Just this semester, and we’re about eight weeks in, I’ve dealt with a student who literally has a new complaint daily, is convinced everyone is out to get them and truly seems to have an undiagnosed mental health issue. I’ve had physical fights in class, a complaint of an instructor purposefully misgendering students and all of the standard issues we face every semester which includes students disappearing due to life as well as anxiety and mental health issues. This also includes veteran students suffering from a range of mental health issues including PTSD which manifests itself in a variety ways and behaviors in the classroom.

My 81 year-old mother asked a question many people do around this, what’s wrong with these kids, why can’t they just suck it up like we did? First, this is something we always do, every generation thinks they are tougher than the next. And just like my parents thought my generation was weaker and lazier, their parents’ generation thought the same of them. I went on to explain to my mom that a senior in college this year was born the year of the 9/11 attacks. So while they have no memory of the day, they grew up with the American trauma surrounding 9/11, and throughout their entire childhood, the rhetoric of the war on terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then in 2008 they faced the great recession, again, they were young but even young children can feel the tension and stress that their parents are exhibiting. Heck, even the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse theory was something that they were exposed to as kids. In 2021 they then lived through the first global pandemic in over one-hundred years. They lived through lockdowns, grandparents dying, losing a year or two of in-person school and again, massive quantities of anxiety and fear. The message we often give to kids is that things will be better in the future, but this is a generation that has grown up understanding the risks of global warming and are watching them come true in real time. And the frosting on top, they get to doom scroll social media and read a million conspiracy theories about all of this.

Sure, previous generations went through things as well, for me it was Nixon, the anxiety of the Cold War and Y2K. But while we faced the beginnings of twenty-four hour news networks, we didn’t face nearly the information load that kids face today. Our society is also more anxious as a whole and this weighs on them as well. So it makes sense that students are more anxious than ever and therefore more likely to fold under the pressure all students face at college.

So what do we do about it?

The first thing I want to address is something I saw in one piece that I read. The last thing we need is to form more committees and talk the issue to death for the next three years. I do agree with other suggestions I’ve seen in the literature, particularly around changing our campus cultures around mental illness. It’s really important for us to talk about the issue with students, to really listen to what they have to say about what they need. We need to make it ok to talk about these issues and address possible solutions, to desitgmatize this issue as much as possible. Our instructors and other staff on the front line with students need to be aware of the issues and the resources available. They need effective training and support in how to handle the situations they will face. We also need to appropriately support and provide the resources to fund the things campuses need to do to help students. This obviously includes counseling resources, but it also means funding for staff and faculty training, informational resources and expansion of campus wellness programs and medical staff. Most of all we need to infuse the idea of a caring campus into all of the people that work at our colleges. Just like we all play a part in student success, we also can all play a part in campus wellness and mental health. Finally, these same resources to assist students also need to be made available to faculty and staff. Like they say on the airplane, put your mask on first before helping others, staff and faculty who are more supported and experience better mental health, are more likely to successfully do that for our students.