America lost more than a thousand college students to suicide last year, and there’s little reason why 2016 will see a break from the tragedy.
Despite this, the mental health challenges that plague so many students on a daily basis fail to garner significant attention—apart from when the unspeakable happens. That may mean that it is not acknowledged until a student taking their own life or the lives of those around them.
But a failure to address or acknowledge this issue doesn’t mean it isn’t pertinent.
The statistics speak for themselves when it comes to this issue and help illustrate how common mental health problems are on college campuses.
The most recent quarterly report published by the American College Health Association is based on the responses of 22,931 students from 47 institutions of higher education. According to their findings nearly one in two respondents felt things were hopeless within the last 12 months, more than half experienced overwhelming anxiety within the last 12 months, and 35 percent said they felt so depressed it was hard to function.
For psychologists like Dr. Greg Henriques, the director of the School of Psychology Doctoral Program at James Madison University and contributing blogger to Psychology Today, it’s become all too apparent the nation’s college campuses are in the grips of a health crisis.
In his article “The College Student Mental Health Crisis,” Dr. Henriques writes, “Evidence suggests that this group has greater levels of stress and psychopathology than any time in the nation’s history.”
He cites two meta-analyses—the combined findings from several independent studies—that found high school students at the turn of the 21st century experienced, on average, the same level of anxiety as psychiatric patients in the 1950s.
Henriques also states the people who are in the best position to identify the state of mental health on college campuses are the directors of counseling centers.
At North Central, that person is Tatiana Sifri, who directs the Dyson Wellness Center where she’s worked since 2002.
She says there’s been much discussion within the field of psychology recently about what’s causing the spike in mental health issues. But, there simply hasn’t been enough research done to definitively say what’s behind the crisis.
“What everyone talks about is more stressors than ever before,” Sifiri says.
Examples of these stressors include: family issues, exams and homework, pressure to fit in socially, an increased need to participate in extracurricular activities, and financial worries as the cost of higher education continue to rise.
In addition to these stressors, Sifri also pointed to developmental factors such as the rise of helicopter parenting as another underlying issue.
“I just saw a woman who talked about college students today versus ten years ago who have not had the opportunities to reach certain developmental milestones that other generations had,” said Sifri.
She offered an example which really illustrated this point: decades ago, kids freely roamed the streets of their neighborhood, with no instructions to be home by a certain hour or to not go past a certain boundary.
“That’s a developmental milestone, when you get to go and explore and then come back,” Sifri said. “You have to go through some things to figure out how to get back on time, maybe you confronted some things on the way. And you can feel accomplished and more confident.”
The constant hovering from parents, however, prevents children from having these learning experiences. As a result, many go away to college after eighteen years of constant nurturing and struggle to adjust to their newfound independence.
Sifri was also able to provide some insight into how common mental health problems are among the North Central student body. During winter term alone, there were 1,229 counseling appointments at Dyson, with 269 students being seen. Sifri said the end of the year total for counselling appointments is usually around 4,000.
Despite how common mental health problems are, even at North Central alone, this issue continues to be something of an elephant in the room due to the stigma that surrounds mental health in America.
Alison Malmon is the founder and executive director of Active Minds, an organization dedicated to raising mental health awareness among college students. Malmon wrote a strongly worded article relating to the issue of stigma for the Huffington Post.
It in the article, Malmon writes:
“One in four college students struggles with a mental health illness in a given year. While we often have negative images in our mind about what the issues are and mean, mental health disorders are a part of many of our lives and can become a relatively normal part of everyday life. Yet, society has painted the picture that this quarter of us is helpless, scary, and even dangerous, and promotes the myth that seeking help for your mental health makes you weak.”
In recent years, research has proven stigma to be an inhibitor of students’ ability to get the help they need.
Dr. Daniel Eisenberg, a professor at Stanford University, published an article in which he surveyed students at 26 campuses over the course of two years. His research found that two thirds of students in need fail to seek help due to fear of consequences for getting help, apprehensions about its effectiveness and feeling that their struggles are too trivial to warrant professional help.
In spite of this, Sifri believes things are getting better:
“I do think, more than ever, students are absolutely coming here and talking more freely about coming to college with some sort of diagnosis before or having gotten therapy before or seen their high school therapist.”
Sifiri says this is important because it means students are feeling more comfortable to reach out and seek the help they need.
Moving forward, they key to getting students the help they need—and reducing the number of people who take their lives—is changing the attitudes people hold towards mental disorders.
