College Students Suffering Through Despair and Repair

Universities are struggling to support their harrowing students, and research on plummeting mental health shows it.

By: Miani Stafford

On most college campuses, although universities try to support mental health, they lack the complete and ideal representation of support for their students. This has everything to do with suicide being the top reason for death in students between 15-24. College students are thrown into a new way of living and adulting with little help for balancing stress, loneliness, and adjustment while simultaneously feeling unsafe and unsupported. These are huge factors in the decline of mental health stability in college students.

Universities must work harder to help prevent these tragedies by providing reliable support for all students while understanding the intersectionality that plays a part in the lack of such when it comes to race and academic performance.

Suffering & Struggling with Stress

College students are experiencing an increasing trend in rates of depression and anxiety as the years continue, and not all of them seek treatment/are getting treatment for such. The proportion of students experiencing suicidal ideation has grown from six percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2017 and even though more students are getting help, only a little more than half of those with symptoms of depression and anxiety have received recent treatment. We can understand how looking at stress levels and anxiety in college students can help articulate the mental health decrease in students and the increase in suicide rates, especially with the help of a few researchers.

The authors of NCHS's “Suicide Stats” touch on this when they mention “Suicide is a major contributor to premature death in the United States, especially among people aged 10–34, for whom it is the second leading cause of death”, but what is the cause of this increase? While researching and understanding Foreign Affairs’ “Generation Stress” and Time’s “Record Number of College Students Are Seeking Treatment for Depression and Anxiety - But Schools Can't Keep Up”, it is clear that they both focus on two similar themes: the initial roots of stress and the resources available (or not) for students struggling with stress.

Foreign Affairs imputed a great deal of insight into “why students experience more stress and anxiety than previous generations” and suctioned it down to three factors: safety, economics, and technology. These factors are inexplicitly discussed in the Times piece as those researchers determine how economics is a reason for the terrible ratio between mental health counselors and students at universities, supporting the idea that there are not enough resources available for students struggling with stress.

The main researcher in the TIME's piece, Katie Reilly, interviewed a student to get their input on stress as a college athlete. The student recalled the overwhelming feeling that she felt from the stress that caused her to feel a decrease in her mental health and forced her to stop attending classes and following through with her responsibilities. With this, we can now understand how taking a closer look into students’ academics can help identify the decrease in the number of college students who are experiencing mental health symptoms, including thinking about suicide, to help prevent tragedies.

Universities must develop ways of providing support systems that make students feel safe, both economically, socially, and academically.

The Weight of Loneliness

The purpose of “Understanding Stress”, an article by ​​several academic researchers, was to “contribute to [our] understanding of factors associated with academic performance, with a specific focus on stress given that it is the health-related factor most often identified by students as impeding their performance”, and it did just that. It found that students often begin to experience a decrease in their academics when feeling depressed. In other words, it is likely that when students begin to feel depressed and their mental health is declining that they will want to be alone.

This is why taking close looks at their attendance record and class participation can be helpful when identifying college students who are experiencing mental health symptoms or contemplating suicide. College students who experience mental health symptoms, including thinking about suicide may also begin to start skipping club events and sports practices, which essentially leads to loneliness.

Female students were more likely to face stressors in social activities and intrapersonal problems such as changes in diet and sleeping habits (JEUMP)”, and Nelly Springer, a former D1 soccer player at the University of Alabama can consent to this. She exclaimed how her lack of sleep from stress certainly had a lot to do with her losing her spot on the team. She describes this feeling of losing everything she's worked for, both academically and physically, as extremely lonely.

Brené Brown’s podcast with Dr. Vivek Murthy's “Loneliness and Connection”, we can also understand how the loneliness Springer was feeling can be considered a factor in the decrease of her mental health. Murthy talks about how much of an emotional tax loneliness has on both the brain and the body, and Springer is quoted admitting “it was probably the loneliest experience” she has ever had to deal with. When thinking about the podcasts' three dimensions of loneliness, it is safe to say that Springer was experiencing collective loneliness: the hunger for a network or a community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests. Springer experienced stress at her university, forcing her to isolate and be removed from her favorite things, resulting in collective loneliness which circles back to the digging of her deeper depression.

Universities must prioritize the building of resilience against stress to prevent loneliness for their students.

Feeling Ethnically Unsupported

It is essential to understand how being racially different from the majority of your surroundings can cause a feeling of discomfort during one's college career. Psychiatric Symptoms And Diagnose Among U.S. College Students: A Comparison By Race And Ethnicity, a passage about how mental health can vary in college students based on their race and international status, falls in line with this. The author of this article states that “ the mental health challenges of college students are a critical public health concern, and they may be exacerbated among racial and ethnic minority groups during college”. Some students are feeling ethically unsupported when they are surrounded by people who do not look like them, increasing depression rates and universities are struggling to identify these students because they don't come forward.

Jackson Cleavy, the author of JUEMP’s “Effects of Race and Ethnicity on Mental Health…” thinks agrees with the notion that feeling ethically unsupported by a student's university can have everything to do with increased depression and suicide rates, as well. They both agree with how much of an effect being different than the majority of one's campus can have on mental health. These authors even state furthermore, the “prevalence rates and treatment rates differ across races and ethnicities, tending to burden minority groups with worse mental health”. This article then does a study to determine the ethnicity of clinical staff on campus compared to the ethnicity of students on campus. He found that “these data the variance between the racial/ethnic composition of the student body and the clinical staff of each institution was calculated” to determine that the ratio is poor. The Psychiatric article and Cleavy's article both suggest that race and ethnicity are overlooked on college campuses when it comes to mental health. They both follow along with the idea of the major effects that feeling ethically unsupported can lead to, like symptoms that typically lead to suicide.

This then ties us back to the idea that universities need better mental health staffing, which is further discussed in the TIMES article.

Although the most direct answer to help support college students experiencing a decline in their mental health would be to refer them to a counselor or someone who specializes in mental health on campus, funding for such is lacking and appointments are not dependable as the student-to-faculty ratio in this area is poor. For students of all ethnicities, it is extremely difficult to get professional counseling help as a form of mental health resource because the staff that is there is typically unavailable anyways since there are so few of them.

Students describe themselves as not going to university counseling because they realized they “needed something the university wasn't offering”. Sometimes there is just “not enough available counseling staff” and how “the wait time for treatment at counseling centers grows longer during midterms and finals week”.

Cleavy states that it is hard to seek help for racial insecurities on campus because students are sometimes in fear that what they need help with will not be recognized as problematic, but students need assurance from their universities that their problems are worth being listened to.

Overall, we are now able to see how struggling and suffering from stress leads to a heavy weight of loneliness students have to carry on campus and then feeling ethically unsupported to reach out for help has allowed for clear ways in identifying college students struggling mentally. Developing a few ways to prevent these tragedies involves providing support systems that make students feel safe - both economically and socially -, an addition of resilience-building classes for students, and an increase in a diverse clinical staff.

Options at Syracuse University

Those apart of Syracuse University experiencing depressive symptoms and contemplating suicide have many options to feel supported and comforted without professional guidance, though, as this university prioritizes mental health. Key resources available at SU for mental health/wellness include a 24-hour Crisis Support Service (315.443.8000.), the ability to take a mental health leave of absence that does not affect your academics, pet therapy more than twice a week without an appointment needed, group counseling, and many different forms of mindfulness activities at our Barnes Center.

Syracuse University also has many different support groups for the most common struggles college students deal with such as eating disorders, anxiety, and more. Though scheduling appointments with therapists here can be difficult, there are so many other options that can help struggling students like mindfulness activities throughout campus and supportive systems on the Syracuse University Instagram to make students feel safe!

When understanding what Syracuse University can do for building resiliency, especially for minority or international students who experience a higher level of stress when interacting with unfamiliar people in a new environment, Syracuse University can form a group counseling for groups who identify with the same race or from the same country to hopefully cause students to feel more comfortable opening up about their problems. Cleavy from JEUMP agrees as well, as she states how “ the last is of greatest import as a source of increased stressors, since stressful life events are a risk factor for mental illnesses, and being a racial or ethnic minority carries a unique set of stressors”.

The growing need for attention to the mental health of college students has produced much research examining the multiple causes that might lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders, and it's discussed here how universities can better support their suffering students of such. Essentially, we now know what to look for in college students dealing with declining mental health and how universities must help them.