Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (https://ijec.org/author/pdempsey/page/3/)
In the wake of Sandy Hook and other school shootings of recent years, gun control advocates – and some politicians, including President Obama – have renewed a push for changes to existing gun laws.
Yet others say that mental health services, rather than gun reform, should be the focus
In the aftermath of the April 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, which left 33 people dead and 25 others wounded, Missouri’s Department of Homeland Security compiled a list of recommendations for universities to follow in order to decrease the likelihood of a similar attack occurring on a Missouri college campus.
Among the most important recommendations were calls for a higher percentage of counselors per student and for mental health counseling to be provided for students 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
More college students are arriving on campus reporting serious mental health problems and more students are threatening suicide than in the past. But some college counseling services, such as those at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, are so understaffed that many students have to wait weeks before getting help.
A decade ago, Thomas Murphy was a college dropout who used alcohol and drugs to deal with undiagnosed depression. Now he’s back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he co-leads a chapter of Active Minds, a national, student-run group promoting open conversations about mental illness. Therapy made the difference for Murphy. But he can’t receive it at school. When he re-enrolled at UW-Madison and went to the counseling center, he walked out with no appointment and a list of referrals.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is seeing more demand for mental health services but is struggling to meet that demand.
More of the university’s students are on psychiatric medication and more students are diagnosed with severe issues such as depression and anxiety than in years past.
More students are coming to college with severe mental health disorders like bipolar, ADHD, depression and schizophrenia.
A 2010 national survey shows the number of students seeking counseling for severe psychological problems has more than doubled in the last 10 years. In the worse case scenario, such trends in mental health may cause students to become violent to themselves or others, if there is no early intervention and psychological services are not sought.
Ball State University senior Krystel Brattain has been dealing with depression and bipolar disorder since she was in sixth grade. Eight years after her initial diagnosis, during her sophomore year of college, Brattain said she noticed her depression worsening. “I felt very tired, very sad,” she said. “I would cry randomly without any real triggers. I felt very alone.”
Those feelings led her to seek help at the Ball State Counseling Center.
In 2009, Vincennes University’s counseling center was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Indiana Campus Sexual Assault Prevention Project to serve as a model for sexual violence prevention in the state.
But a year later the center declined to participate in the project because it didn’t want its small staff to reduce the number of clinical hours spent with students needing mental health counseling. The center also discontinued a grant-funded program to reduce underage drinking.
The number of students using Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) at Indiana University Bloomington has increased sharply.
Last year, 3,539 students made 18,183 counseling center visits. The previous year, 3,187 students visited the center 13,588 times.
Students at Indiana State University used to enjoy free mental health services from the campus’ student counseling center.
This was before the Board of Trustees, faced with mounting money problems, decided in May of 2010 to eliminate this free service.