The Real Reason Record Numbers of College Students Are Seeking Mental Health Treatment
PT KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES - Just over four years ago, when Alyshia Hull arrived on campus at Cayuga Community College in Auburn, New York, she found herself surrounded by hundreds of other wide-eyed new students. But beneath her eagerness to start her first semester at college, Hull was battling something that made her feel entirely alone: anxiety.
PT KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES - She had dealt with anxiety her whole life, but the pressures of being in a completely new environment only made things worse. “I was so scared of not being good enough,” she tells Health. She felt uneasy in campus social situations, her grades started to slip, and she even opted to take a two-hour bus ride to class every morning because she didn’t feel confident driving. Some days, she would stay home all together, feeling like she “just couldn’t do it.”
A surge in students needing help
PT KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES - To make things even more complicated, Cayuga didn’t offer any mental health services for students. Like most community colleges, the school didn’t have the resources to help students like Hull, of which there are thousands, suggests recent data: A 2018 World Health Organization survey of 14,000 students across the globe found that one in three college freshmen reported dealing with mental health disorders in the years leading up to college.
It can be nearly impossible to manage anxiety like Hull’s without treatment, and that can lead to poor grades, time management struggles, even the possibility of dropping out of college. In a 2017 survey by the American College Health Association (ACHA), students reported that anxiety and depression are among the biggest factors that negatively affect their academic performance. Forty-two percent of participants said they had felt so depressed in the past year, it was difficult for them to function.
Hull stuck it out, and two years after she started at Cayuga, she transferred to a school that did have mental health services: the State University of New York College in Oswego County, New York. She began to see a therapist, and she slowly felt herself taking control of the anxiety that had plagued her first two years.
She described the change she saw in herself as a release. “Imagine your greatest fear, that feeling of being so scared, but experiencing that every day,” she explains, “and then that being fear being lifted.”
Hull is part of a rising number of college students seeking out mental health treatment on campus. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of students visiting counseling centers surged by about 30% on average, while academic enrollment grew by less than 5%, states a 2015 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH). The report also found students seeking help are increasingly likely to have previously engaged in self-harm or attempted suicide.
News outlets have described the rise as a “crisis,” and it’s easy to see why. A significant number of college students grapple with mental health disorders and there’s been a dramatic increase in the demand for mental health services on campus. But the question is, what’s really going on?
A generation that sees no stigma
Gregg Henriques, PhD, director of the combined clinical and school psychology doctoral program at James Madison University in Virginia, posed this question in a 2018 Psychology Today article: “Are we seeing an ‘epidemic’ of mental illness racing through the country? Or are we seeing a shift in attitudes, definitions, and the expectation of, availability of, and willingness to seek mental health treatment?”
Henriques went on to argue that a cultural shift toward normalizing mental illness is the primary reason for the rising numbers, though an actual increase in mental distress is an “important secondary cause.”
Ben Locke, counseling director at Penn State University and head of CCMH, also believes that cultural shift to be the force behind the numbers. “It’s my perspective that the way people are interpreting this increase in utilization is fundamentally wrong,” Locke tells Health. He believes that more students visiting campus counseling centers isn’t a crisis—rather, it's a sign that the efforts put in place to make students more comfortable seeking help are working.
Locke references the Garrett Lee Smith Act, a federally-funded suicide prevention program that’s funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into counseling centers across the country since 2005. (It was put into place after Garrett Lee Smith, son of Gordon Smith, a U.S. senator from 1997 to 2009, took his own life.) Now, 14 years later, the effects of that infusion of funding is manifesting in the high number of college students accessing counseling centers on or near campuses that have benefited from the extra funds.
Other sources of mental health funding are also operating nationwide, Locke explains. But most of them, including the Garrett Lee Smith Act, focus on three goals: reducing the stigma of mental illness treatment, increasing "help-seeking behaviors" (in other words, empowering people to recognize when they need help and to ask for it), and gatekeeper training (educating people so they can identify warning signs and refer others for treatment).
“All three of those mechanisms, stigma reduction, increasing help-seeking behavior, and gatekeeper training, accomplish the same end goal, which is they increase the rate of identification and referral of people at risk,” Locke says. “What we’re seeing in counseling centers is what I believe to be the signs of a successful intervention.”
Locke says it's unfair to assume that the rise in mental health treatment reflects a lack of resilience in today's college students. To prove his point, he compares mental-health treatment to national breast cancer screening programs. “If you spent 15 years trying to convince women to come get their breast cancer screening, you wouldn’t turn around and say, ‘Why are all of these people coming in for services? Don’t they have any resilience?’”
He believes the stigma of mental illness is down, awareness is up, and people who need mental health services—especially those who have already engaged in self-harm or have attempted suicide—are finding treatment.
Source : health.com
