The need for better mental health services on college campuses has been lamented by thousands of articles, essays and tweets for some time now, but the demand for change has been especially forceful over the past five years. Why do we keep hearing this seemingly endless call for action? The answer is simple: because we have yet to see any.
Last week, The Guardian published an article highlighting the results of their annual Student Experience survey — in particular, the results concerning mental health on college campuses. An overwhelming 87 percent of first-year students reported that they found it difficult to cope with social or academic aspects of college life, with studying and schoolwork topping the charts for student stressors.
It feels like these effects are especially prevalent at larger, more competitive colleges like Boston University. The academics are rigorous to say the least, and social pressure to pursue jobs, internships and extracurriculars can put students over the edge. With nearly nine out of 10 college freshmen reporting struggling to transition, it is clear this problem is as important as ever, and still taking center stage on campuses across the country.
However, the problem doesn’t necessarily lie in the extent of services that BU offers, but rather how they offer them.
Student Health Services has a Behavioral Medicine sector that deals solely with mental health issues. Here, students are offered assessments, diagnoses, short-term treatment, referrals to community resources, phone consultations and a 24/7 on-call service for mental health emergencies. But, when students don’t know how to access these resources, it’s as if they don’t exist at all.
For many students, seeking help is hard. If the only way students can address their mental health issues is by researching where to go and what to do to find help, it is inevitable that many students simply won’t follow through and get the help they need. This is no way to handle something as serious as mental health issues — and we can always do better.
Social media, mass emails and handouts distributed during orientation advertising the importance of mental health and the resources BU offers are a good start, but that’s all they are — a start. BU needs to bring this outreach into the classroom, so students are reminded each and every semester, if not more, that their mental health is a priority.
If our faculty drilled the importance of mental health into students’ heads, at the very least, students would never have to figure out themselves what a mental health problem looks like, and how they can get help. Professors should undergo training on how to recognize students who might need help so that they can refer these students themselves when need be.
When a school is as large as BU, students can feel like they are falling through the cracks. This doesn’t need to be the case.
Making a dedicated effort to improve mental health services is in the school’s best interests as, well, you need happy, healthy students to graduate each year in order to build the alumni base that is so critical to a university’s success. When a school clearly cares about its students well-being, that does not go unnoticed.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to face the problem head on, in the form of a major academic change — freshmen now take their classes pass/fail, without having to worry about a slip in their letter grades permanently staining their flawless GPA.
That kind of drastic step is not necessarily called for across the board, but BU could still afford to take a big step toward helping its students in lessening academic pressure.
The college experience is often branded as “the best four years of your life” or put into other enthusiastic, over-simplifying terms. But students moving across the country, living away from family for the first time ever and having to make new friends, all while pursuing academics at a higher level than ever is nothing but simple.
BU making a major change in the way it addresses its mental health services would help students realize that even if their college experience isn’t one big music video, there are resources out there that can help them thrive when they come to campus.
