Increase in mentally ill students in U.S. colleges/universities

The increasing problem is attributed to a number of factors:

1. Medical breakthroughs have made antidepressants and other psychiatric medications widely available, enabling young people with mental illnesses that might have prevented them from going to college a few decades ago, to enroll in colleges and universities.
2. Getting accepted to a good college has become harder over the past 15 years, which means stress.
3. Indulgent parents: Some college counselors say they see students who are less resilient than earlier generations and unable to cope with failure — from which they have been cushioned by their over-involved parents before they leave home at 18.
4. Tulane University president Michael Fitts thinks that the breakdown of religious and family support structures over the past few decades has left some kids feeling lost. The trend toward going to college farther away from home separates students from their social support networks even more.

All of which raises the question of to what extent is a college responsible for its students’ mental health and non-academic life.

College counseling didn’t really exist until the late 1940s, when the federal government created hundreds of counseling centers to help guide a new generation of G.I. Bill-funded students arriving on campus. By the end of the 1960s, about half of all colleges provided some mix of vocational advice and psychological help.

But staffing levels haven’t kept pace with the increase in students who need help. Recently, overwhelmed universities have begun to put limits on how often students can access their mental health services, to cut down on the weeks of waiting for appointments. Some college counseling centers mandate “resiliency training” courses that teach students how to deal with failure and setbacks before they are granted access to a counselor. 

“Twenty to 25 years ago, counseling centers tended to see students as long as they needed to be seen,” said Robert Gallagher, who has been surveying the nation’s college counseling directors for decades at the University of Pittsburgh. “As the demand for counseling services increased, and the complexity of the problems that students were bringing to centers grew, many centers began to promote themselves as a ‘session-limited’ service, and much more staff training went into moving students through the therapeutic process more quickly.”