Not ready for real world
A lack of emotional resilience among students is contributing to a mental health catastrophe at Australian universities, according to a study by Headspace
ONE in three students have thought about self-harm or suicide in the last 12 months while 70 per cent rate their mental health as “poor”, according to a study by Headspace.
The youth mental health organisation found 83.2 per cent of students at Aussie universities and TAFEs felt stressed, 79 per cent felt anxious while twothirds reported high or very high psychological distress and more than half had trouble sleeping.
CEO Jason Trethowan said the alarming results were not a huge surprise as young people living away from home for the first time were more vulnerable, had no clear check-point for mental health difficulties and could “fall through the cracks”.
The 2013 American National College Health Assessment, which examined data from 125,000 students at more than 150 colleges and universities in the United States, found almost half experienced overwhelming anxiety over the past year.
“Those who have worked in counselling centres for the last decade have been consistently ringing a bell saying something is wrong, things are getting worse with regard to college student mental health,” American psychologist Ben Locke said.
So, why are rates of mental health so alarmingly high among students?
Reduced stigma around mental health has encouraged students to come forward about their problems. Social media has also been cited as a factor.
However, there is another important (and undermentioned) component: the declining resilience of students.
In Psychology Today, psychologist Peter Gray wrote that students “have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realise they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention.
“So now, here’s what we have: Young people, 18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it,” he write.
Students aren’t to blame; they’re simply playing the hand they’ve been dealt. The fault lays with helicopter parenting and weak university administrators.
Growing up, kids have relied too heavily on their parents. When they go to university, where mum and dad aren’t around to help them, the weight of life’s responsibilities falls on them like a ton of bricks.
So the university has to pick up the slack. One Yale student infamously told a staff member that university is “not about creating an intellectual space ... it’s about creating a home”.
If nothing changes, that Yale student will be correct. At which point, the process of ‘high-schoolisation’ would be complete. Universities will have adopted the role of a parent.
Harvard Law professor Jeanine Suk wrote in The New
Yorker: “About a dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students.”
One manifestation of declining student resilience can be seen in the frequent use of ‘content warnings’. A content warning is a short statement that warns people of potentially distressing content.
They’re used for a range of subjects including: sexual assault,
racism, sexism and abortion.
But there is some evidence that shows content warnings do more harm than good.
“(Content) warnings are counter therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD,” Harvard psychologist Richard McNally wrote in The New York Times.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt used an example of a woman who is afraid of elevators. “If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators,” he said.
Instead, he recommended “exposure therapy,” a process of slow and steady exposure to symbols of trauma. Like an immune system, exposure therapy builds up one’s emotional resilience through small reminders of what they find traumatic.
With content warnings, students aren’t allowed to build their resilience to potentially distressing content. So when they are inevitably confronted by such content — without a content warning — their emotional response is catastrophic.
“Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents were far lower during the Great Depression, World War II, [and] the Cold War,” Mr Gray said. “The changes seem to have much more to do with the way young people view the world than with the way the world actually is.”
There was once an expectation that university students were adults and therefore, didn’t require support in dealing with life’s everyday hurdles. Now, the ‘hand-holding bureaucracy’ found in high schools, has crept into the university.
And it’s not doing students any favours.