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Key points
- High-pressure college environments can trigger or worsen mental-health conditions.
- When choosing a college, it’s important to research the balance of academic and social climates.
- Health services should include a wellness center and disability services that extend accommodations to those with mental-health issues.
I can’t help but notice that my generation has not had insignificant cause as of late to question the value of undergraduate education.
Four years of reading Kafka and going to parties where people composted in the urinal for the honor of being named “most wasted” may not, in retrospect, have been the most productive way to spend our formative years.
But for those of us who struggle with mental health, college can be far more damaging than just a dubious expenditure of time and money: The intense pressures of campus life can exacerbate mental illness.
If you’re a graduating high school student with aspirations of attending college, I strongly recommend researching not just the academic and social climates of the schools but also the mental-health resources and accommodations available. While a student may not present with mental health issues at convocation, college stressors are known triggers for mental health issues.
In the past, I’ve been highly critical of my alma mater — recognized as a highly-competitive, academic pressure cooker of an institution set in a deceptively bucolic environment. My memoir, in particular, is pretty much relentless in its criticism of the school’s administration, student body, and culture. Tellingly, a school store t-shirt bore the slogan, “Work. Friends. Sleep. Choose two.” My college wasn’t a great place for me, or for a number of my friends, fellow students, and alums who also suffered from mental health issues.
A Hyper-Competitive College Environment
There was a culture of hyper-competitiveness and masochism I discovered among the student body that the administration didn't do enough to address (and in some ways tacitly encouraged); the college made demands of its students that precluded the time-consuming self-care necessary to manage a mental illness. And this made my obsessive-compulsive disorder much, much worse, far beyond what the college’s minimal mental-health services were capable of addressing, to the point that it seriously threatened my well-being.
I have a dear friend who used to argue about this with me, who said that I was too critical of our college and that the pressure-cooker environment actually worked for him and many people we knew. I wish I’d told him: Stairs work for many people, too. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to build ramps.
What to Look for in a College
As students make college choices in the upcoming months, the “ramps” in the college environment they might look for include, at minimum, a balance in academic and social climates, an extensive orientation program that encourages the creation of friendships early in freshman year, a wide variety of extracurricular activities, and, of primary importance, high-quality psychological and wellness services.
A college's health services should include on-site counseling and psychological services departments (sometimes referred to as CAPS) that employ therapists and psychiatrists or should at least have a formal relationship with an off-campus facility. Wellness centers should offer stress-reduction programs and peer counseling groups. Disability-services departments should extend services and accommodations to those with mental health issues.
Maybe this is was just a my-college thing, or maybe it’s a problem with American higher education overall. But although it's improving, I still see those same hurtful attitudes toward the mentally ill, blaming them for their problems and shaming them away from treatment, echoed in a lot of our contemporary discourse, academic and otherwise.
College is supposed to help prepare young people to enter society as functioning adults. But for some of us, it can be an incubator for psychological illness — and, as such, should not be taken for granted as a rite of young adulthood but undertaken with utmost consideration and caution.
Your school selection should go beyond simply looking at where it stands on the list of U.S. News & World Report's Top 10 Liberal Arts Colleges.
Copyright Fletcher Wortmann 2022
