Isolation creates a mental health crisis on campuses
Our nation’s college students are in grave danger. Despite their best efforts, many campuses are facing viral outbreaks, closing their doors and sending students home.
But what about the thousands of colleges that have remained open? Are they keeping their students safe?
Administrators at many colleges (especially those with smaller student bodies) are answering with a resounding: Yes. They point to required testing, bans on group gatherings, and students housed in single rooms. Many believe that if their COVID-19 numbers remain low, then their students are safe. But they are dead wrong.
The most brilliant educators in our land have — in a very short period of time — become enforcers of student isolation. And that is exactly the problem.
With a terrifying degree of irony, our nation’s experts in student engagement have suddenly reversed course, placing students in solitary confinement and forbidding them to engage with anyone at all. And the consequences are devastating.
The overlooked crisis facing our college students in the age of COVID-19 is a crisis of isolation. While we adults have been perseverating about keeping our students physically safe on campus, many of our students have been facing a devastating trifecta of loneliness, anxiety and depression.
These are all the elements required to plunge already vulnerable 18- to 22-year-olds into a collective mental health crisis — one that we are unprepared to prevent, treat or respond to with adequate care.
Whenwe read about unauthorized parties on some campuses, it’s easy to shake our heads at students who flout social-distancing rules. But this just
distracts us from the larger, invisible crisis happening behind closed doors.
The majority of college students in 2020 aren’t in the news for throwing parties. They’re sitting in their rooms, following the rules and suffering in silence. This is especially true for firstyear college students, who are taking their first steps into adulthood at a perilous time.
In typical times, universities know
how to create a community. Welcome wagons are rolled out, doors are decorated, hall meetings are planned, icebreakers are organized.
Every mental health practitioner knows these events are not just fun and games. They also serve a much more serious purpose: to support a student’s mental health as they navigate one of the most important transitions of their lives.
Imagine sending an 18-year-old to
a college campus without communal support, without orientation programs and without in-person classes. It’s a recipe for disaster, and few parents would agree to do so. And yet in recent days many parents have unwittingly done just that.
In recent weeks, while occupied with their (important) efforts to prevent COVID-19, many colleges quietly eliminated all in-person orientation and community-building programs. By creating a parallel universe of the college experience — one that keeps students in solitary rooms, fails to nurture community and neglects to welcome them to their new environment — colleges are averting one crisis at the expense of another.
To be sure, college administrators are facing the challenge of their lives: How to keep their students safe on campus. It is no easy task and parents worldwide are grateful for their efforts. But today’s college leaders also have a blind spot: They are forgetting that their students’ health is not limited to their physical health.
OnOctober 10th, nations around the world honored World Mental Health Day. This day is a critical reminder to pay attention to the mental health crisis on our college campuses. Even pre-COVID-19, the advocacy group Active Minds reported that suicide was the second-leading cause of death among college students — preceded only by accidents, including alcohol-related accidents. If we do not pro-actively support the mental health needs of college students in the age of COVID-19, these numbers will only keep rising.
College presidents and administrators must not ignore their students’ mental health needs. In this challenging time, mental health advocacy groups such as Active Minds, The Jed Foundation and The Youth Mental Health Project are sounding the alarm about the other health crisis on our country’s college campuses.
College leaders, we implore you to hear the call.
Laurie Katz Braun, who grew up in Allentown and graduated from Parkland High School, is a rabbi, writer, and youth mental health advocate who holds a doctorate in pastoral care. She is a past president of the Women’s Rabbinic Network, and serves on the leadership team at The Youth Mental Health Project: www.ymhproject.org