Mental Health Problems—The Sad “New Normal” on College Campuses

College campuses are witnessing record levels of student mental health problems, ranging from depression and anxiety disorders to self-injurious behaviors and worse. A clinician writing a few years ago in Psychology Today proclaimed it neither “exaggeration” nor “alarmist” to acknowledge that young Americans are experiencing “greater levels of stress and psychopathology than any time in the nation’s history”—with ramifications that are “difficult to overstate.”

The problems on college campuses are manifestations of challenges that begin sapping American children’s health at younger ages. For example, many students enter college with a crushing burden of chronic illness or a teen-onset mental health diagnosis that has made them dependent on psychotropic or other medications. The childhood prevalence of different forms of cognitive impairment has also increased and is associated with subsequent mental health difficulties. In addition, a majority of American students are now unprepared academically for their college careers, as evidenced by historically low levels of achievement on standardized tests. Once in college, large proportions of students—increasingly characterized as emotionally fragile—blame mental health challenges for significantly interfering with their ability to perform. The outcomes of these trends—including rising suicide rates among students and declining college completion rates—bode poorly for young people’s and our nation’s future.