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Press Release
College students exhibiting more severe mental illness, study finds


Thanks to American Psychological Association for this article.

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Justin
Rosalind Franklin University
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Thu, Aug 12, 2010, 11:30 am CDT
I think that part of this increase comes from the fact that students today feel that it is safe to go to health services and address issues like depression and other severe issues. The further you look back, the more inappropriate it was to tell anyone, even a counselor, about depressive thoughts or how your head is functioning on the whole. I'm not sure how good the patient-clinician privacy was, but I look at some people 10 years older than me and hear what they have to say about college, and it was very much a private thing that you just dealt with. Part of that may be because the treatments were not very effective anyway? But I believe that most of it is the stigma of having a mental illness. People today are more willing to admit that they have such an illness more than ever before.
So although these numbers are going up, I feel that they are moving in the right direction - people are using the health clinic as a real clinic and not just a bouncing board to get you through a break-up. Furthermore, these numbers are only the students that do go to health services. I'd like to see the numbers as a whole. Out of the entire university, what percentage of students are seeking help for their mental illness? This would be more indicative of the increase than the percentage that have come through counseling services. But even with that data, unless you had administered the questionnaire to the entire population of students to do a general screening of how many people potentially have mental illnesses, there is really no way to compare now from 10 years ago. I do believe these numbers are going in the right direction - more people who need help are seeking help and getting it. It's hard enough to just go through college, but to go through college or grad school with a mental illness makes it just that much harder. :/

Brian Krueger, PhD
Columbia University Medical Center
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Thu, Aug 12, 2010, 12:01 pm CDT
I totally agree with you Justin, and that's what the article says too! Students feel more comfortable talking about their issues these days. I guess the better question is: Is anyone ever going to be considered normal/healthy these days? It seems like we're very quick to "diagnose" certain behaviors as problems, but are they really? Is it maybe just a part of the learning/growing experience?
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