http://news.yahoo.com/tulane-s-mental-health-meltdown-144028239.htmlTulane’s mental health meltdown
After a spate of campus suicides, students are demanding more psychological services. But how much responsibility does the college bear?4/3/15
Late last November, as Tulane’s campus was winding down for Thanksgiving break, University President Michael Fitts sat on an airplane, reading through a sheaf of documents. In his hectic first year on the job, Fitts was crisscrossing the country, introducing himself to donors and alumni associations. But in this quiet moment midair, the former law professor finally had time to focus on his students.
What he read deeply moved him, but also left him worried. Fitts was only a few months into his new job, and five of his students were dead, three of them by suicide. Here in front of him was a 28-page compendium of students’ firsthand accounts of their experiences with his school’s mental health system. It was jarring and disturbing.
The stories depicted a campus in a full-blown mental health crisis. Students struggling with anxiety, crippling depression and other serious mental illnesses said they weren’t receiving the help they needed from the overloaded campus counseling center, which has a hard cap on how many times a student can see a therapist. Students wrote about falling into a hole of despair, wanting to die, and feeling as if no one at Tulane wanted to help.
Some of them directly criticized Fitts, saying he didn’t seem to care enough about what was obviously a dire situation. “I have never seen you on campus or heard about you meeting and getting to know our students,” one wrote. Another said Tulane felt like a “very expensive deathtrap” — a pressure-cooker of an academic and social environment with limited mental health support.
The new president says he had not realized that so many Tulane students were in so much pain. And he only learned about it because a Tulane senior named Shefali Arora took it upon herself to solicit stories from her peers on social media and methodically gather them into a public Google document to chronicle the campus’s mental health crisis.
Arora took this step in response to the latest student suicide, which had shaken the campus just a few days earlier. Mary Travis, a popular and artistic sophomore from Texas, committed suicide in her dorm on Nov. 22, shocking her friends and sorority sisters, some of whom had gone out with her just the night before. In September, Daniel Rupert, another sophomore, killed himself in his dorm room, devastating members of his fraternity and other groups of friends. A public health graduate student took her life off campus in October. (Two students died as a result of accidents over the same period, adding to the grief. Benjamin Burlock, another sophomore, accidentally fell in a dormitory to his death. And Andy Joseph, a junior, died on campus in an accident caused by an epileptic seizure.)
“The comments were very helpful for me in getting the sense of the pain out there and also what were the issues in the uppermost in people’s mind,” Fitts recalled.
He tapped out a reply to Arora on his iPhone, apologizing for his “grueling” travel schedule, which prevented him from interacting with students as much as he would have liked to. “We are definitely talking about ways we can support all members of Tulane who may be at risk,” he wrote. “On a separate note, I also am vowing to try to be more visible and available on campus, including eating at Bruff [Commons Dining Hall] more often.”
Since then, Tulane has rolled out some small changes to its mental health services to address student criticisms, and finally held a public memorial, called “Tulane Cares,” outside the student center for the five who died. But the changes fall short of what many students wanted, and are unlikely to meet the staggering need for mental health services on campus.
Tulane provides a snapshot of how universities across the country are struggling to face up to their students’ overwhelming mental health issues. It’s Tulane’s turn now to search for answers, to announce some reforms to its counseling center, to vow to “destigmatize” mental health issues on campus.
But tomorrow, it’ll be another university. No college is immune. The problem is growing, and it’s universal. Universities are welcoming a generation of students who are more anxious than ever, and who appear to be cracking under the weight of the growing pressure to get into a good college and then to pay for it. Society burdens kids with this pressure, and then sends them off to college to deal with it. At the heart of the wrenching debate is a touchy question: How much responsibility do colleges really bear for the psychological well-being of their students?
More and more students are showing up to college already struggling with one or more mental illnesses.
Today’s college freshmen are significantly more likely to report that they are struggling with depression than even their predecessors of just five years ago, and college counseling centers are bending and nearly snapping under the pressure of serving kids with serious mental health issues. Nearly 95 percent of college counseling directors said their campuses have a greater number of students with “severe psychological issues” than ever before, according to a 2014 survey. Thousands of students were hospitalized for psychiatric conditions by counseling centers that same year. more