A Look Inside College Mental Health
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, college counseling services were reporting an uptick in the number of students with serious mental health conditions. Under Pressure: The College Mental Health Crisis, a new documentary from Call to Mind and APM Reports, focuses on colleges’ responses to a perceived mental health crisis among students and asks: What is a college’s responsibility for helping students navigate mental health challenges? Alisa Roth, Call to Mind’s mental health correspondent, shares more from her reporting.
(Photo via Unsplash)
By Alisa Roth, Mental Health Correspondent
Data is still coming in about what the pandemic is doing to the mental health of young people. But even before the pandemic, large numbers of young people had been reporting being anxious and sad: A national survey of college students in 2020 found that nearly 40 percent experienced depression. One in three reported having had anxiety, and one in seven said they’d thought about suicide in the past year. In a survey of directors of college counseling centers in 2020, nearly 90 percent reported that demand for their services had gone up in the previous year. And all of those numbers have been going up for years.
Take the University of Richmond for example. Enrollment there has remained flat over the past 15 years, but the number of students seeking campus counseling services in that time has doubled. And demand for counseling services at schools all over the country has gone up, leaving administrators, counselors and others, wondering how they can keep up.
When we started working on this documentary, we thought about looking at why students are so unhappy. But it quickly became clear that even if we had a whole season to explore the question, we wouldn’t find an answer. The short answer is that we don’t know exactly why so many more students are having a hard time with their mental health. Some studies blame social media for making young people miserable; others have called out helicopter parents, who have left their students unable to handle the realities of life. There’s also less stigma around mental health and mental health care, and some experts have speculated that students are just more willing to ask for help.
What’s clear, though, is that many more students around the country are asking for help and that schools are struggling to provide it. So we decided to examine what students are asking for and what schools are — or aren’t — doing to help. And we found that when students don’t receive the help they’ve asked for, they’re working to make the change themselves.
That’s what Alexandra Marello did. She was in a dance class as a freshman at Skidmore College in upstate New York when she had her first panic attack. “My face got really red,” she told me the day we chatted over Zoom, “and I started feeling shaky and faint.” She left the class, hyperventilating and crying, and called her father, who told her to go to the counseling center.
Alexandra Marello
When she got there and asked to see a counselor, though, she said, the receptionist told her that, since she wasn’t feeling suicidal, she would have to make an appointment and come back. Marello was furious. The receptionist also offered to connect her to therapists in town, but Marello wanted to see somebody immediately. Plus her family couldn’t afford the therapy.
“[Counseling] should be provided because we’re paying so much money to come here,” she told me.
Philip Glotzbach, who was president of Skidmore at the time (he retired in 2020 after 17 years at the school), told me that he was always happy to support students’ mental health. But colleges are in the business of education, he said, not mental health care.
“Colleges and universities cannot be an environment where when you show up, you get a therapist,” he said. “Again, we can provide resources that help a young person make that transition from late adolescence to early adulthood and more, more responsibility and more self-direction and self-regulation. I think that's got to be the model, and the overall framework. And so the resources that we provide need to be oriented toward that goal.”
The problem, in Glotzbach’s view, is that even if schools want to help, it’s simply impossible for schools to keep up with the demand.
“My metaphor for this is that it's like freeways in Los Angeles,” he said. “The freeway's clogged, so you add a lane. Well, two weeks later, that lane is clogged as well, and so you add another one. I mean, you can't build your way out of the problem.”
Marello and a friend launched a petition, and later a protest, to demand more mental health care on campus. Skidmore did later add another counselor and hire an outside firm to provide a 24-hour emergency hotline. (Glotzbach said the changes were already underway at the time of the protest.)
Skidmore limits students to eight counseling sessions a year, though its counselors can connect students to off-campus treatment.
Other schools have taken vastly different approaches to student mental health, from Brown University, which offers same day appointments and half-hour sessions for students who just need a quick chat, to the Virginia community college system, which offers no mental health care at all.
Contact your local public radio station for more information about when you can hear Under Pressure: The College Mental Health Crisis in your area, or listen online via the Educate podcast from APM Reports.