Mental and Behavioral Health
Carlos Arias Vivas argues in the Daily Pennsylvanian that UPenn’s 19-day winter break does not provide adequate time to “de-stress and process everything that has happened since the beginning of the year.” According to Vivas, all other schools within their consortium have much longer winter breaks. He argues that as the Penn administration continues to reckon with high levels of mental health issues and suicide within its student body, lengthening the mid-year break should be a consideration.
Princeton student Urvashi Uberoy argues in the Daily Princetonian that, despite an abundance of mental health resources on campus, the majority of students are not aware of them or do not know how to access them. According to Uberoy, this lack of awareness of resources outside of the counseling center has caused it to become overburdened.
University of Portland added a $75 per semester Health and Counseling fee onto their tuition bill. According to University Vice President of Financial Affairs Alan Timmins, the fee was implemented to “catch-up” on added costs from the previous four years that stemmed from new programs like the mental health emergency call line, and new positions like the coordinator for Early Alert, who takes calls and emails from those concerned about a student’s mental health. However, according to The Beacon, while mental health services have become more robust, medical services have become deficient. Staff departures have meant students have to seek prescriptions and care off campus.
Next semester, Chapman University will add an emergency hotline and a case manager to its mental health services. Currently, more than 45 students are on the waitlist; in October, ninety were waitlisted. Dean of Students Jerry Price said that the school has been working with student government to establish a “new model” to help students get emergency and short-term counseling, and find resources within the community.
According to a new study by the meditation and mindfulness digital service Headspace, one in three students have thought about self-harm or suicide in the last year, and 70% rate their mental health as “poor.” The New York Post reports that these alarming results are part of a larger trend of declining resilience among students. The Post references a Psychology Today article in which psychologist Peter Gray writes that students “have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realize they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention. So now, here’s what we have: Young people, 18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it.”
This semester, Texas Christian University introduced “Let’s Talk,” a program designed to remove the stigma around formal counseling. The program offers confidential counseling sessions across campus, including walk-in appointments. The program was introduced as the number of students seeking help continues to rise. Over the past three years, the TCU Counseling and Mental Health Center experienced a 32 percent increase in the number of students seen in the first few months of school.
According to a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge, mindfulness training can help support students at risk of mental health problems. The randomized control trial found that a mindfulness course led to lower distress scores during the exam term compared with students who only received the usual support. Additionally, the study found that distress scores for the mindfulness group during exam time were below their baseline levels measured at the start of the year, while the students in the control group became increasingly stressed as the academic year progressed.
A growing number of researchers and tech companies are beginning to mine social media for warning signs of suicidal thoughts in an effort to test programs to automatically detect these signals. The app company Mindstrong is developing machine-learning algorithms to correlate the language that people use and their behavior, such as scrolling speed, with symptoms of mental health issues. Mindstrong’s president, Thomas Insel, says that collecting “passive” data from a person’s devices could be more informative than having them answer a questionnaire. This year, Facebook announced that it was rolling out its own automated suicide-prevention tools, and Apple and Google are pursuing similar ventures.