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Psychiatry
When Did We Start Laying Such Fragile Eggs?
Are we crazier than we used to be, or are we just crazy about diagnoses?
Posted July 3, 2019 Reviewed by Davia Sills
During my freshman year of college, the girl who lived across the hall from me swallowed a whole bottle of pills while a bunch of us were out at a bar.
An acquaintance of mine that year was on some kind of anti-depressant and was a pathological liar and didn’t return for spring semester. Another kid (this is going to sound like I’m making it up) walked around campus playing the bagpipes at all hours and drinking from a metal flask like a bad, walking cliché of a drunken Irishman. He also didn’t return for the spring semester.
Mental illness, maladjustment, and run-of-the-mill social problems were all around back then. What’s different now, it seems, is that these issues are so ubiquitous, affecting almost every single student in every college class I teach.
When I first made this observation, years ago, I was teaching at a community college, and I wondered if the issues my students were dealing with were par for the course in their being non-traditional students (e.g., back from active duty, single moms pursuing education, people coming back to college-level work after decades of doing something else). It made sense that these non-traditional students would be faced with more challenges than the traditional 18-to-22-year-old students pursuing college full-time, paid for either by parents or loans.
But now I’m teaching at a large university where the vast majority of students are full-time and of traditional college-age—and I’m seeing more psychological and emotional issues in students than ever before. It’s astounding.
There are doctors’ notes, medications, medical explanations, psychiatric evaluations, egregious absences, family emergencies, hospital intakes, referrals to offices that help veterans, the victimized and marginalized, and anyone else who needs support, and third parties on campus who go to bat for students who are failing academically, but have heartbreaking stories as to why.
What I wonder is this: Are we sicker and more mentally ill as a society now than we were 25 years ago, or have we become a diagnosis-crazy society in which everyone’s got something thanks to the wild success of psychiatry and big pharma in the 21st century?
