Mental health in universities calls for special precautions

By Landom Roussel     1/21/10 6:00pm

The mental health of college students is in crisis. Over the past few decades, college campuses around the United States have witnessed a dramatic rise in depression, suicides and even sociopathic behavior heretofore unseen. Social theorists have pointed to various causative factors in the general population: increasing isolation of individuals from family and community ties, a culture of expertise that has expanded the definition of deviance and an identity confusion related to a popular culture that no longer ascribes to a monolithic worldview.

College students, however, suffer from higher rates of mental illness than does the general population, even higher than their same-age peers who enter the workforce. This disparity begs the question: What is it about today's university environment that contributes to mental instability? If there is one answer, it is the loss in collective vision of the common good in the educational philosophy of today's universities.

University administrations and mentally ill students have always had a tumultuous relationship. The notion that colleges bore any responsibility for their students' mental health arose in the 1920s after World War I, when "college physicians argued that protecting student bodies was essential to the nation's viability as a world power," according to historian Heather Prescott. While increased public support for college health programs has promoted "the right kind of education to withstand the . stress of modern life," as military psychiatrist Dr. Stewart Patton argues, university provision of such services often amounted to a heightened attempt to "clean up" student populations whose behaviors were too deviant for university norms.

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Notably, mental health services at the "big three" - Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University - launched programs in the same decade to root out homosexuals and Jewish applicants, the latter viewed by some colleges as "menaces" because "some mental health experts claimed their superior intellects made them more prone to mental disturbances," as Prescott notes.

But after the country's G.I. Bill-induced influx of increasingly more heterogeneous student populations following World War II, President Truman's Commission on Higher Education presented strides in supporting less discrimination by college mental health services. But in the 1960s, student protests put university administrators on the offensive, turning college therapists into what psychiatrist Thomas Szasz called "double agents." That is, "a faithful conspirator with the student in his struggle for liberation from parents and educational authorities," yet for the administration, "a wise physician who will select and control students and inform [administration] as the needs of the school and community require."

These days, the protests of the 1960s have died down, but increasingly higher rates of suicides, lawsuits and campus shootings have revalidated this "double agent" nature of college mental health services. However, changes in the canon of university education in many aspects have fostered a sense of identity confusion. Canon wars of the 1960s overturned traditional sources of knowledge that did not continue to fit student interests. Students no longer found themselves bound to courses in Greek philosophy or European literature but were free to choose from a wider variety of courses like liberation theology or cultural studies.

Yet as "liberating" as such new opportunities were - and I speak as a student grateful for the intellectual freedom my Rice education entailed, allowing me to double major in biochemistry and Hispanic studies - social theorists have increasingly noted the negative consequences of such individualization on identity formation. As psychologist Rob Whitley describes in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, the onslaught of choices faced by the modern university student may lead to "an overwhelming imperative to actively search for, find and cultivate meaningful social roles and unique self-identities . all using their own initiative." The task of choosing a major, classes and extracurricular activities while attempting to carve out a meaningful social role can become overwhelming.

Granted, while the "de-hedgemonization" of university education has benefited students in many ways (e.g., through greater civil rights and gender equity), it has also created an environment that is, according to Whitley, "anomic and recalcitrant to a universal morality and metanarratives that decree desirable social roles and identity."

Finally, another growing trend in university education over the past decades is the prioritization of technical knowledge over the humanities. Last February, a New York Times article noted that the decreasing marketability of humanities majors has made humanities degrees less sought after. Budget cuts of humanities departments in universities across the country, alongside increasing funding for science and engineering, point to the fact that this shift is not merely economic but also indicative of a declining support for the academic pursuit of "what it means to be a human being."

Rightly, our technological advances have allowed for comforts not previously available. However, the reduction of knowledge to merely mechanical terms has pressured students to technical mastery before mastering themselves. Education no longer becomes a means of personal growth and maturation but a task whose success is determined by empirical standards. Thus, the track runner's success is defined by a 400-meter time, the pre-med by an MCAT score, the pre-law student by an LSAT score and so on. Such pressures can wreak deep psychological havoc on one's sense of self-worth. Many college suicides, in fact, have been linked to the student's perceived "inadequate" academic performance.

The mental health of college students today hinges on the university's departure from the common good as its first cause, evidenced in its "double agent" motives in mental health services, a postmodern education philosophy and prioritization of technical knowledge over humanities. These ideas must be dismissed for the trend of rising mental illnesses to be substantially reversed.

Let me be clear, though - I am not advocating a return to the "good old days" in college education when mental health services were not provided, required courses were more fixed and our scientific understanding was not subject to rigorous experimentation that today's technology allows. Rather, I am encouraging professors and students alike to keep in focus the common good in all their educational endeavors. This demands an education devoted to those universal human values of justice, beauty and truth, which are essential not only for the common good, but also for our emotional well-being.

Landon Roussel is a Jones College alumnus.

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