Colleges vexed by rise in mental health needs
“Let’s not treat heart attacks, let’s treat high cholesterol. In mental health, we need to ask ourselves that same (type of ) question.”
Schools scramble to provide help for the surge of students who need it
As a student EMT at Georgetown University, Benjamin Johnson didn’t see a lot of serious physical emergencies. 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 as the higher education world starts to wake up to the urgency of addressing mental health on college campuses nationwide.
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. Because the counseling center required payment for appoint- ments, many students didn’t feel comfortable involving their parents.
Johnson succeeded in getting his university’s board of directors to allocate more money 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 expect 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
Ashley Koetsier of Woodstock, Vt., reads a plaque about a college student who died of suicide. A group called Active Minds placed 1,100 backpack plaques representing suicide victims at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
She stands on the emerald field, the sky blue and cloudless, holding an archer’s bow. In the moment, there is only her and the arrow, only the target 50 meters away. If she aims too high, the arrow will fly high and out of control, and if too low, it’ll plummet into the ground.
In the moment, she doesn’t have to think about her anxiety. She doesn’t have to think about the dark days when she would lie in bed for hours, feeling like she’d never be happy again. She doesn’t have to think about the days in the partial hospitalization program where a nurse monitored her food intake.
In the moment, Megan Larson, a senior biology and religion major at UCLA, doesn’t have to think at all.
Larson is one of many college students who have to not only juggle the stress of college but also battle their own brains. She is among the 150,483 college students who sought mental health treatment in 2016, according to an annual report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.
Larson’s battle with anxiety started as early as fourth grade. In an attempt to find relief, she’d pick at her scalp and arms until wounds and scabs formed. These days, to keep her mind busy, she knits, colors pictures and does crossword puzzles. She competes on the college archery team at UCLA, something she describes as akin to yoga.
At UCLA, class discussions can be unbearable for Larson. She has sought accommodations from her professors. When she felt a panic attack coming, she’d try to regulate her breathing or distract herself with games on her phone.
Christopher Biehn, a sophomore at Ithaca College, suffered a severe head injury when he was in eighth grade. He was exercising at his home in New Jersey, pulling against a resistance band attached to the garage door, when the band’s metal clip came undone and smashed him in the back of the head.
Biehn’s parents noticed something off with his behavior. He wasn’t acting like himself. He believed he was going to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and meet President Obama.
“I’ve only been full-blown manic one time,” Biehn said. “I’ve never been high on drugs, but I guarantee, feeling manic trumps any experience being high. You feel like you’re on top of the world. You speak less. Thoughts race at a thousand miles a minute. You have these grandiose ideas. You feel so elevated, and you have limitless energy.”
Biehn has many dreams. He wants to be the host of the Today show one day. He wants to change the world. He hosts student events and fundraisers. He once biked 45 miles dressed in an American flag spandex morphsuit and a tutu to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
But some days feel black and white, devoid of color and life. That’s the only way he knows how to describe his depression. For seemingly no reason at all, he finds himself spiraling.
“There’s a chemical warfare happening inside my brain,” Biehn said. “Sometimes I’ll cycle because it is the nature of my brain.” He suffers from bipolar disorder, a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy and activity levels.
After the mania comes the crash. During his senior year of high school, Biehn became suicidally depressed every other week.
“I went to a leading expert on bipolar disorder, and he told me I had one of the nastiest cases of the illness he has ever seen and that he was happy I was still alive,” he said.
Fortunately, Biehn said, Ithaca College is more than accommodating.
“They have been wonderful in responding to my situation and allowing me to take the time off that I need,” he said.
Since coming to college, Biehn has had to take three medical leaves. Though he uses off-campus support resources, Biehn said Ithaca has a number of on-campus resources for students, including a counseling center.
What keeps Biehn going is his faith. He believes that his suffering has purpose and that it is his role to reach out to others and to educate the public.
During her sophomore year, Larson joined UCLA’s chapter of Active Minds. A non-profit organization dedicated to raising mental health awareness among college students, Active Minds was founded in 2003 by Alison Malmom after her older brother committed suicide.
For the first time, Larson was around people like her, who could understand what she was going through. That was the catalyst for Larson to seek treatment.
Larson said therapy sessions should be made more available to students, and there should be a more diverse group of counselors and psychiatrists on-campus.
“There’s this idea that you should be able to handle it on your own and you shouldn’t need help and that [mental illness is] some kind of character flaw, like there’s something innately wrong with you,” Larson said. “That’s really not the case. A lot of the times it is genetic or environmental or the combination of the two.”
“There’s a chemical warfare happening inside my brain. Sometimes, I’ll cycle because it is the nature of my brain.” Christopher Biehn, a sophomore at Ithaca College