The state of college students' mental health continues to decline. What's the solution?
In the months before Massachusetts Institute of technology sophomore Elizabeth Shin died, she spoke with seven psychiatrists and one social worker. The psychiatrists diagnosed major depression; the therapist recommended hospitalization. Shin told a dean that she was cutting herself and let a professor know that she wanted to commit suicide. The housemaster of her dorm and two of her friends stayed up nights to watch her. But it wasn't enough. On April 10, 2000, Elizabeth Shin locked her dorm room door and set her clothes on fire. Four days later, she was dead.
{{B}}41. Many colleges are running into thorny situation.{{/B}}
Her parents, Kisuk and Cho Hyun Shin, filed suit against MIT, charging its employees with gross negligence and wrongful death. It's an extreme case, but it illustrates a problem facing many other schools, as more and more students line up at counseling centers requiring increasingly intensive therapy or medication—or both.
{{B}}42. Students with substantial personality problems.{{/B}}
The number of freshmen reporting less than average emotional health has been steadily rising since 1985, according to the newest data from an annual nationwide survey by the University of California-Los Angeles.
{{B}}Reasons for the decline of college students' mental health{{/B}}
College therapists cite several reasons for the apparent deterioration in student mental health. Not only has this generation grown up in the much-maligned era of the disintegrating American family, it is also more used to therapy and so more likely to seek help. As competition to get into college gets tougher, students burn out before they even get there. And kids with severe psychological problems, who in the past wouldn't even have made it to college, now take psychotropic drugs that help them succeed.
{{B}}43. The soaring number of visitors to college psychiatrists.{{/B}}
Colleges first created counseling centers for students who needed career and academic advice, says Robert Gallagher, author of the counseling center survey and former director of the University of Pittsburghs' services. As psychological counseling took over, the centers' other advising functions were packed off to other parts of the campus.
{{B}}44. Inadequacies of college therapy services.{{/B}}
The ballooning caseloads mean there isn't the time or the staff to offer long-term therapy to any but the most troubled. "You can't just load up with the first 100 students and see them regularly without having openings for new people," says Gallagher. Instead, colleges focus on getting students over immediate crises.
{{B}}45. What's the solution?{{/B}}
Some schools have tried filling the gap by getting more involved in students' lives. The University of South Carolina, the University of Nevada-Reno, and Texas A&M offer indepth seminars on the transition to college that help students get to know one professor really well.
So where do parents fit in all this? In many cases, they don't. Federal privacy laws reinforce the separation by forbidding the release of educational records to anyone but the student. So despite those hefty tuition checks, parents like the Shin often don't get a fully picture of what their children's lives are really like.
Shin did not want her parents to know about her misery, and no one told them about her cries for help until after she had burned herself. Her father believes he and his wife could have saved her. With his lawsuit, he says, he hopes to remind schools that for each student, "There is a family."
[A] But today the original centers are swamped: Davidson, for one, has seen a 52 percent increase in student visits to school therapists since the 1992—93 school year.
[B] The American College Health Association reports that 76 percent of students felt "overwhelmed" last year while 22 percent were sometimes so depressed they couldn't function. Meanwhile, in the latest National Survey of Counseling Center Directors, 85 percent of directors surveyed noted an increase in severe psychological flaws over the past five years; 30 percent reported at least one student suicide on their campus last year.
[C] "If a student tells you she took five extra pills over the weekend," says Gertrude Carter, director of psychological services at Bennington College in Vermont, "it's hard to tell if that's a grab for attention or an actual threat."
[D] New statistics show that many freshmen arrive on campus depressed and anxious and feel worse as the year progresses. At the same time, colleges must also negotiate the legal and emotional pitfalls of caring for their charges, not children but not yet fully adults.
[E] In response to the task force report, MIT is putting together support teams of physicians, other health-care professionals, and experienced counselors to spend time in the dorms, socializing with the students and keeping an eye on them.
[F] One Yale student suffering from anxiety during his sophomore year rarely saw the same counselor twice. "It felt like the person I was talking to wasn't really there," he says. After five sessions, he stopped going. "I wouldn't want to go there again," he says, "but what else is there?"