From exams to personal safety to interpersonal relationships, many situations cause stress, anxiety and depression for Northwestern students, and the recent rise in serious mental problems on campus has experts, administrators and students trying to sort them out.
Many experts attribute the increase in college mental-health issues across the country to the types of students enrolling in today’s universities.
“There is a lot of evidence showing students are arriving on campus with more mental problems,” said Robert Gallagher, former director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Counseling Center who conducted several national surveys of college counseling centers. “The stresses of college exacerbate the existing problem.”
Because of better medications, which allow people to succeed despite mental problems, more students can go to competitive colleges, Gallagher said. But that means those students need more support from campus counseling services.
Gallagher’s most recent national survey of counseling directors at 283 colleges showed that 95 percent of the schools reported an increase of students taking psychotropic medications.
PRESSURE TO BE PERFECT
Studies have shown entering students often have other mental conditions and even personality traits, such as perfectionism, that can lead to mental problems.
“A lot of students find nothing wrong with perfectionism, and family and friends think it’s great,” said NU’s Counseling and Psychological Services psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Gobbi. “But we forget the flipside, where people come to NU never having experienced a real-life failure … and once they get here they have a problem.”Ellen Stolar, a Weinberg sophomore, said she was like most NU students when she first came to college – used to being near-perfect in academics and activities. But Stolar realized perfection was much harder to attain in NU’s competitive environment.
“I know at least for myself and a lot of my friends it was really easy to take on a bunch of different tasks and do it perfectly in high school,” she said. “It was pretty jarring to realize how hard it was to carry over that kind of precision and exactness to college.”
CAPS psychologist Dr. John Dunkle said this is the first year CAPS added “perfectionism” to its list of patient symptoms.
“They’ve been finding in research that perfectionism plays a role in depression, anxiety and even suicide,” he said.
SHAKY SUPPORT SYSTEM
Dunkle said the greatest underlying cause of mental problems is a lack of emotional support from family, friends or campus organizations.
“Support systems are crucial, and it is also crucial for students to perceive that support,” Dunkle said.
For some students, support systems are difficult to build.Andrew Cheng, a fourth-year mathematics graduate student, said he struggled to establish connections when he first came to NU from China.
“When I was in China, I could walk any street at any time but here it’s not that easy,” he said. “You have to recognize a bad community or a good community.”
Cheng said he found NU support in the Chinese Students and Scholars Association and in his academic department.”But I know a lot of students who come from China, they don’t have many things to do but study,” he said. “They don’t have a social life.”
William Banis, vice president for student affairs, said student isolation is a problem the administration is working to correct.
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
The precarious world situation and shaky economy also worry many students.
Banis said the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and health concerns form “the context of our students’ lives.” Some students’ families also have experienced job losses and salary cuts during the past three years of recession.
Although students are reluctant to admit it, alcohol also adds to mental health concerns on campus, Gallagher said.
“Students rarely come into counseling saying they have an alcohol problem,” he said. “But you find that when students are having problems, often alcohol is one component.”
Alcohol often is related to problems such as unwanted sexual experiences and a lower grade point average, he added.
Mitch Holzrichter, risk management chairman for the Interfraternity Council and a Weinberg junior, said he thinks students sometimes drink in response to stress.
“You can drink to have fun, but it shouldn’t be to relieve stress,” said Holzrichter, who also serves as advertising manager for Students Publishing Co., which oversees The Daily.
It’s not alcohol alone, but the mixture of alcohol and stress, depression or anxiety that worries many experts and administrators.
“When you throw in high-risk and dangerous drinking, and how that may interact with psychotropic medication, with depression, with stress, then we just add fuel to the fire,” Banis said.
LITTLE WORRIES, BIG PROBLEMS
Sometimes the smallest stresses add up to the largest breakdowns, Gobbi said.
“Almost everyone I know has had that pseudo-nervous breakdown, when you have midterms or do badly on a paper or have to stay up all night studying,” Stolar said. “All you really want to do is curl up in a fetal position and cry, but you don’t even have time to cry.”
Students often try to fix everything by focusing on one problem, but that usually only creates more stress, Gobbi said. Small changes, such as getting more sleep and eating better, can be more effective.
“A lot of students say, ‘I’ll just study for two weeks and then I’ll be caught up,'” she said, “but you need to look at the whole realm. … Chances are you’ll feel a lot better if you make a lot of little changes in a lot of little areas.”
The Daily’s Kimra McPherson contributed to this report.
