Mental and Behavioral Health
A new study has found that one third of freshmen from 19 colleges in eight countries report symptoms consistent with a diagnosable psychological disorder. Lead author Randy Auerbach and his research team analyzed data from the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health International College Student Initiative, which surveyed almost 14,000 students from 19 colleges in eight countries. The researchers found that 35 percent of the respondents reported symptoms consistent with at least one mental health disorder. Major depressive disorder was the most common, followed by generalized anxiety disorder. According to Auerbach, “While effective care is important, the number of students who need treatment for these disorders far exceeds the resources of most counseling centers, resulting in a substantial unmet need for mental health treatment among college students. Considering that students are a key population for determining the economic success of a country, colleges must take a greater urgency in addressing this issue.”
University of North Carolina students have mixed responses about the effectiveness of CAPS spell out as well as what its role should be at a major university. Spencer Mamo, a UNC junior, told the Daily Tarheel that the University will never be able to provide enough lasting support for students with the current model CAPS provides. “The University’s job isn’t necessarily to look out for the mental health of its students,” Mamo said. “So many of the issues we face, like the somewhat toxic rise of social media, are just going to keep growing, and places like CAPS can’t provide support for every single student when it gets to that point.” Luke Davis, offered a different view and told the student newspaper that it is UNC’s responsibility to provide adequate mental health care for everyone.
An assistant professor of engineering at Florida Polytechnic University is suing the institution for alleged violations of the First Amendment, claiming that it failed to renew her contract because she publicly criticized its mental health services — both before and after a student suicide. In June, Christina Drake spoke at a meeting of the Board of Governors for the State University System of Florida after numerous staff terminations, including the university’s sole campus mental health counselor, linking decreased on-campus mental health services to an increased risk of student suicides. “I pleaded with the board,” Drake said in an interview Thursday. “This place is a pressure cooker. Mental health is not an area that we can afford not to make a priority.” Then, in August, a Florida Poly student fatally shot himself while sitting on a campus bench. Drake was quoted in an article about the students death, calling the school a “ticking time bomb.” Drake alleges that university administrators immediately expressed “anger” over the Times article, and that she was repeatedly encouraged in person by various supervisors to stop being so “negative” about the university. Days after the article appeared, Provost Terry Parker informed Drake that her contract would not be renewed for next academic year.
Joshua Song, a fourth-year student at Ohio State University died last week after a fall from a university parking garage. Song’s death was the latest in a series of deaths and/or falls from garages on the Ohio State campus. Following incidents in April, Ohio State President Michael V. Drake announced the creation of a task force to improve mental-health resources and practices at the university. The task force’s report, released hours after Song fell, said certain safety measures already are completed or planned to prevent suicide attempts, including the installation of signs with crisis phone numbers on each campus parking garage, student-designed murals to be installed on garage top floors and security enhancements to the Ohio Union south garage. The task force recommendations were broken down into six main points: advancing a culture of care, enhancing and standardizing screening procedures, enhancing resources, communication of support and mental health promotion, expansion of delivery mechanisms – focused on creating a digital platform that helps student cope with mental health- and exploring campus environments to advance additional safety measures.
Hamilton College Counseling Center has joined forces with other departments at the school to promote mental health and wellness on campus. This includes the addition of mental health resources to the College’s library catalog that will include “books, work books, websites, and other electronic resources” covering topics such as self-help and skills to cope with stress and mental illness.
College students are turning to online forums, chat rooms, and social media groups to discuss their mental health disorders. In Facebook groups, students with less common mental health illnesses, such as borderline personality disorder, find a community where they can share what they can’t discuss openly at school and trade advice on coping techniques.
In a new study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers found significant disparities in mental health treatment across race/ethnicity. The study found that among college students with clinically significant mental health problems, half of white students received treatment in the past year, compared to only one-quarter of African American and Asian students, and one-third of Latinx students. Overall, 42 percent of the students met criteria for a mental health problem, with prevalence ranging from 40 percent among African American students to 53 percent for Arab/Arab American students. Among African American students with a mental health problem, only 21 percent had received a diagnosis, compared with 48 percent of their white peers. “There is enormous unmet need for mental health services in college student populations writ large, and students of color represent a disparities population based on even greater unmet mental health needs relative to white students,” says lead author Sarah Lipson, assistant professor of health law, policy & management at BUSPH.
Jen Smith, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St Louis, is conducting focus groups on the various sources behind student stress. Her motivation came from a survey that indicated that stress and anxiety had risen among the undergraduate study body. These groups, which will consist of undergraduate sophomores, juniors, and seniors, will help the administration find ways to reduce unnecessary academic stress.
The University of Virginia Honor Committee voted unanimously to remove the Admission of Act from the Contributory Mental Disorder (CMD) process, a procedure that allows students to request a psychological evaluation prior to moving through Honor proceedings to determine if a mental health condition contributed to the commission of the offense. The change will remove the requirement that an accused student admit an act, or admit guilt to an Honor offense, before being assessed for a CMD. The CMD is typically overseen by the Office of the Dean of Students and conducted by Student Health or the University’s Counseling and Psychological Services.
Diversity and Inclusion
In the ongoing lawsuit against Harvard University accusing the school of bias against Asian and Asian-American applicants in its admissions process, neither side has sought to call students or alumni to testify in the trial. Now, a group of Asian-American, African-American, and Latin American students and alumni has asked to be allowed to make opening and closing statements and to cross-examine expert witnesses called by the Students for Fair Admissions, the non-profit suing the school. They wrote in a filing two weeks ago that Harvard’s consideration of race in admissions decisions “has benefited them both inside and outside of the classroom.” On Friday, Harvard said in a brief that it welcomed their participation in the trial, while Students for Fair Admission opposed it.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Bridget Burns, the executive director of the University Innovation Alliance, a consortium of 11 large public research universities collaborating to improve outcomes for students across the socioeconomic spectrum, argued that college rankings need to focus more on graduation rates of low-income students.
A new WGBH poll shows that most Americans believe college campuses should be racially diverse, but that the majority do not support using race as a factor in admissions. The poll found that 70% of respondents believe admission should be based on more than just grades and exam scores, and should recognize factors such as athletic and musical talent, leadership and having overcome hardships.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
As a sports doctor for Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, Larry Nassar has been found guilty of assaulting more than 150 young women. A new lawsuit alleges that Nassar raped someone-a former MSU field-hockey player who was 18 years old at the time-in 1992 and filmed the act while doing so. Furthermore, the suit alleges that MSU-and, specifically, George Perles, a current member of MSU’s board of trustees who served as the university’s athletic director at the time of the rape-went “to great lengths to conceal this conduct.” The suit is one of at least a dozen civil complaints filed against MSU and other defendants in federal court on Monday, which marked the last day victims of Nassar’s sexual abuse could sue the university.
The Chronicle reports on an assertion by the Department of Education, that colleges and schools could collectively save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade under the Department’s forthcoming sexual-misconduct regulations. The proposed rules would lower the bar for when colleges must conduct sexual-assault or sexual-harassment investigations under Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, allowing for fewer investigations and less cost. But as the Chronicle reported, experts disagree claiming if colleges have to uphold higher due-process standards when handling the cases, like hiring retired judges to run campus hearings, it could add costs, not reduce them.
Louisiana State University‘s Rape Aggression Defense program, which teaches women how to protect themselves in the event of a sexual assault, is seeing an uptick in interest given the #MeToo movement and recent incidents on LSU’s campus.
According to a new WGBH News/Abt Associates poll, a majority of Americans don’t think colleges do a good job of protecting students from sexual assault. Fifty-four percent of 1,002 adults surveyed say colleges aren’t doing enough to prevent sexual assault. That number jumps to nearly 60 percent for women who feel that way, as opposed to 48 percent of men.
Free Speech
Last year, a liberal graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln publicly berated a conservative undergraduate to the point of tears, causing many in the state to become concerned that conservative students were living in fear on its public-university campuses. Fearing a political backlash, Hank M. Bounds, president of the University of Nebraska system, commissioned Gallup to study the political climate on all four of its campuses. The report, released last week, suggests that most people at the universities, conservatives included, do not feel intimidated or constrained in what they say on campus. However, a substantial minority do worry whether some ideas are welcome. The groups whose speech is most welcome at the University of Nebraska, according to students in the survey, are women and liberals, but students said the university was just as welcoming to men, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and international students. Conservatives were a bit lower in the hierarchy, with 75 percent of students saying conservatives feel comfortable openly expressing their views on campus – about the same as Muslims.
Greg Lukianoff, co-author of the book The Coddling of the American Mind, and the 2015 Atlantic article of the same name, spoke with the publication again about the polarized reaction to his original article, campus protests, students’ expectations for their education, and the increasingly blurred lines between engaging with ideas and endorsing them.
Sleep
A new study suggests lack of sleep is at least as damaging to academic success as binge drinking or doing drugs. According to the study, each night of the week that college students have sleep problems was associated with a 0.02-point drop in their cumulative grade point average (GPA) and 10 percent higher odds that they would drop a course.
Policy
A federal judge ruled this week that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ delay of a key student borrower protection rule was improper and unlawful. A U.S. District Court Judge sided with consumer advocates (two former students seeking relief from their loans and Democratic attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia), who challenged the Trump administration’s postponement of Obama-era regulations governing “borrower defense to repayment.”
Seeking to “evaluate the independence and effectiveness” of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau‘s student loan office, 15 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus sent a letter to Mick Mulvaney, the CFPB’s acting director. The letter arrived on Mulvaney’s desk less than three weeks after the CFPB’s student loan watchdog, Seth Frotman, stepped down, writing in a fiery resignation letter to Mulvaney that under the acting director’s leadership, “the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting. Instead, you have used the Bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America.”
Physical Health
According to a new report by the American College Health Association, about 63 percent of college students aren’t eating the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables every day. Researchers looked at how to improve college students’ diets, and found that staying with a diet that includes the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables requires an “emotional shift”,. The report also said that enlisting family and friend support helped sustain a healthy eating regimen.
Upcoming Event
On September 20th, policymakers, academics, business and community leaders, clinicians, and first responders will gather in Boston for “America is Watching: Response to the Opioid Crisis in New England.” Through five panel discussions, the forum will delineate government initiatives, describe innovative approaches to increasing access to care, examine what constitutes quality treatment, and explore controversial treatments.
