COLLEGES STRUGGLE WITH MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS
Many students who couldn’t attend in years past can enroll now as treatments improve
As a student EMT at Georgetown University, Benjamin Johnson didn’t see a lot of serious physical emergencies.
But what he did see was, as he put it, “the thing no one was talking about.”
Johnson, a senior, called mental health “the biggest problem we saw again and again” — students who were stressed and overwhelmed, away from home, unsure of resources and afraid to seek help.
That realization catapulted Johnson into a months- long journey of fighting for better mental health resources at Georgetown, at a time when the higher education world is starting to wake up to the urgency of addressing mental health on college campuses nationwide.
Yet providing adequate resources for mentally ill students is a significant challenge because of a lack of funds and because the landscape has changed — colleges aren’t equipped to serve a generation of students who are, increasingly, entering college with diagnosed mental illnesses.
Johnson said many students didn’t know about the university’s counseling center, and those who did often felt uncomfortable navigating treatment for a severely stigmatized issue. And because the counseling center required payment for appointments, many students felt the need to involve their parents — and didn’t feel comfortable doing so.
Johnson succeeded in getting his university’s board of directors to allocate moremoney to mental health resources, and the peer counseling service he founded has created a space for students to share their problems.
But Georgetown is just one school. Interviews with student activists, mental health experts and university administrators reveal that more and more students across the country are expecting their colleges to seriously address mental health — and often, it’s a struggle for universities to meet the demand.
The new push for addressing mental health on campuses — 66% of student affairs administrators in a recent survey identified mental health as their top concern — is rooted in a simple supply- and- demand quandary. The need for mental health services has shot up, for a variety of reasons. According to the 201415 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, institutional enrollment grew by 5.6% between 2009 and 2015, while the number of students seeking services increased by 29.6% and the number of attended appointments by 38.4%.
And the 2015- 16 report from CCMH reveals that, among students seeking counseling, mental health as a reason for seeking help has steadily climbed from 2010 to 2016.
Medication use, hospitalizations and suicide attempts have also increased.
One reason for the uptick in demand is that mental health treatment has drastically improved. Students who previously wouldn’t even have been able to attend college can now go because of advanced medication and other forms of treatment, according to Maggie Bertram, associate director of training and education at Active Minds, a national mental health advocacy organization.
That means more students have access to college education, but it also means university counseling centers have a harder time keeping up with their students’ needs.
“You’re seeing a lot more students who have been diagnosed before they even come into college,” Bertram said. “It’s more possible with mental health difficulties to remain in school and be successful.”
Erica Cooke, a senior at Bridgewater College in Virginia who has been involved in her campus chapter of Active Minds for four years, has seen a rise in the number of students seeking counseling. The counseling services used to be notoriously underused — now there are one- to- two- week wait times.
“I’ve definitely seen an increase inmy four years of counseling services being utilized and people talking about it more freely,” she said. “But it’s still such a tough topic to get people to talk about.”
And, more recently, the slow shedding of the stigma surrounding mental health has caused demand to increase, too. As colleges work to make students more comfortable seeking help, they’re also upping the number of students they need to serve.
“The good news is we’ve been successful at increasing referral patterns and decreasing stigma, increasing helpseeking,” said Ben Locke, senior director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Penn State. “The unintended consequences of this culture shift, if you will, is that now we have a demand for services.”
Finding enough funding can be a challenge. Like any part of a university’s budget, the money can be publicly funded through state appropriations or government grants or can come from private hands.
But public schools, whose budgets are constrained by the state, often face a significant challenge getting proper funding to expand services, Bertram said.
“If a state is struggling to balance their budget, it can be on the chopping block just like anything else,” Bertram said. “Everyone’s interested in the success of students— it’s just often amatter of resources.”
Increased demand, Locke said, means colleges are often strapped for resources. For many schools, the most pressing concern regarding resources is simply not having enough counselors.
And that can translate into students having to wait weeks before seeing a counselor or getting cut off after a certain number of sessions.
And since counseling is expensive, some schools are forced to charge students for services. Before Georgetown made changes in its system, Johnson said, appointments cost $ 85 — often unaffordable for students who didn’t want to use insurance or involve their parents.
“Let’s not treat heart attacks, let’s treat high cholesterol. In mental health, we need to ask ourselves that same ( type of) question.” Nathaan Demers, psychologist at Grit Digital Health