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Mental and Behavioral Health

Under a new New York state law, universities and community colleges will be provided with additional prevention tools against suicide and depression. The bipartisan law, sponsored by Sen. Patricia A. Ritchie, directs the state Office of Mental Health to develop educational materials regarding suicide prevention for educators and to work with the New York State Department of Education to distribute the materials to more students potentially battling depression. Sen. Ritchie said in a press release, “Nobody is immune to depression and for many battling the disease, suicide is becoming a path far too often traveled that leaves a wake of long-lasting, devastating effects on friends, family members and communities. By connecting people with the information and help they need – especially students who are at college and away from home for the first time – we will help save lives and let those in need know they are not alone.”

According to a report by St. Louis Public Radio, the four campuses of the University of Missouri System are seeing an increase in requests for student counseling and other mental health services and are working together to meet the demand. University of Missouri-St. Louis has seen a 50 percent increase in students seeking mental health services on campus over the past five years, and at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, it’s been a 20 percent jump over the past year. Chris Sullivan, who oversees counseling services at the UMSL said that the school has done a lot of outreach and wants to expand services. “I have a proposal in to increase the size of the staff,” Sullivan said. “We are able to do what we need to do, but we need more resources to do what we need to do better, and meet a demand that will likely continue to rise.”

According to a new study published in Depression & Anxiety, major depressive disorder (MDD) occurs in 6.9% of first-year college students, and the strongest baseline predictors are history of trauma, parental psychopathology, recent stressful experiences, and other mental disorders in the past year.

On Monday, more than 150 leaders from Rhode Island state government, public and private colleges and mental health organizations met for an inaugural summit on the mental health needs of college students. Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was slated to attend, but was unable due to illness, but former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the lead sponsor of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act, signed into law in 2008 participated in the event, as did three college presidents – Rhode Island College’s Frank Sanchez, Brown University’s Christine Paxson and Roger Williams University’s interim President Andrew Workman. The summit aimed to build a coalition of partners to help optimize and coordinate mental health services across Rhode Island’s colleges. The college presidents said that one of the biggest challenges is looking at mental health as a collective responsibility rather the purview of student health centers. Several Rhode Island colleges are already working to expand the network of support for students struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues. Brown has placed mental health and physical health under the same organization. Roger Williams has trained 80 front-line staff and is prepared to train 80 more this year. Rhode Island College is preparing to launch a 24-hour emergency mental-health hotline where students can get immediate help. Student panelists at the Summit said there aren’t enough resources to treat individuals with chronic mental-health issues, adding that most treatment on college campuses is short-term.

In September, Ohio State University President Michael Drake’s mental health task force released its final recommendations for improvements to the university’s mental health resources. Since then, changes have included hiring new counselors within campus mental health services, reviewing safety enhancements to campus parking garages, and introducing apps that help students cope with stress. The implementation team of the task force is also working on a “warm line,” described as being different from a crisis hotline, in that it is available late at night and early in the morning for students to call and receive support from “highly trained student volunteers.” Subgroups within the implementation team have several projects underway in the academic area, which include putting a mental health statement on syllabi and promoting available training programs for faculty members and others.

Diversity and Inclusion

Just over a year ago, Harvard University‘s leaders announced that, starting with the freshman class in 2017, any student who joined a single-gender social group – like one of the university’s exclusive final clubs, or a fraternity or sorority – would face restrictions. Members wouldn’t be able to hold leadership positions on campus or receive Harvard’s endorsement for postgraduate scholarships like the Rhodes. The groups could avoid the sanctions only if they went coed. As student populations diversify, administrators are increasingly aware of the need to foster inclusive environments, not ones segregated by gender and class. However, many Harvard women say that the administration’s approach to halting gender discrimination has endangered gender-exclusive spaces that weren’t part of the problem, and that such groups remain necessary on a campus where issues like sexual misconduct persist. Since the policy took effect, it’s the sororities and women’s final clubs that have disappeared, while most of the men-only groups continue to operate. This fall, all four of Harvard’s sororities shut down.

Sexual Assault and Title IX

Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, triggered controversy in her campaign to rescind key parts of Obama-era Title IX enforcement framework and replacing them with interim guidance. The Education Department released its formal plan to reinforce the rights of the accused and relax colleges’ obligations to investigate cases in November. Now that those regulations are open for public comments, the responses have poured in. More than 50,000 people and counting have written to decry, praise, or try to modify the proposed overhaul. Many commenters describe their own experiences of sexual assault. Others say they were falsely accused, and welcome changes that they view as reinforcing due process.

A report released Friday by the Michigan attorney general’s office called Michigan State University‘s handling of the case of Larry Nassar, the former sports doctor now serving at least a 60-year sentence for his sexual abuse of hundreds of women and girls, “a failure of people, not policy.” The report, issued by William Forsyth, a retired prosecutor who was appointed independent special counsel by the attorney general, criticizes Michigan State for what it called “a culture of indifference” to sexual assault and for stonewalling “the very investigation it pledged to support.” The “stonewalling” was manifested by “misleading” public statements, “drowning” the attorney general’s investigation in unrelated documents, “waging needless battles” over important materials, and invoking attorney-client privilege when it was not warranted. “Both then and now, MSU has fostered a culture of indifference toward sexual assault, motivated by its desire to protect its reputation,” the report says. The report also says that the university’s Title IX office did not properly investigate allegations made against Nassar in 2014.

Former Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon was charged in November with four counts of lying to investigators about what she knew of the crimes of Larry Nassar. Among the charges are two felony counts, each punishable by up to four years in prison, alleging that she knowingly misled the police. Simon, who is 72, has pleaded not guilty.

In the aftermath of the 2006 scandal in which Duke University lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape, the school attempted to recast its reputation, revising its sexual-assault policies and spending large sums on prevention. By most measures, Duke professionalized its sexual-assault investigations, and in college and university legal circles, it gained a reputation as “cutting edge” in the field of Title IX. Despite these changes though, the university still faces a credibility problem in this area. A Duke student survey, released in 2017, showed that most female undergraduates don’t trust the administration to hold rapists accountable. Only 35 percent of them said the university properly investigates sexual assault. Only about a third believed that “students found responsible for sexual assault are punished appropriately.” And Duke women reported being sexually assaulted at a rate that was noticeably higher than, and in some cases double, the percentages reported in surveys at similar universities.