More students depressed, survey says

The concern for mental health services on college campuses is on the rise and with good reason. According to the American College Health Association, the rate of students reporting ever being diagnosed with depression has increased 56 percent in the last six years.

In a recent article by NPR that discusses the need to prioritize mental health on college campuses, Daphne C. Watkins, a researcher at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, said tight budgets are a main reason.

"First, there are increasing numbers of students with increasingly severe emotional problems. Second, students - and the families of these students - look primarily to colleges and universities to provide mental health and other supportive services for their students. And finally, budgetary cutbacks at these institutions make the growth and advancement of campus mental health services very difficult," she said.

These budgetary issues are also addressed in a recent article published by the American Psychological Association that states, "Many campus counseling centers report being underfunded and understaffed, even as they are seeing more students than ever with severe mental problems."

While ECU, like most institutions, has not been immune to budgetary issues, it continues to place priority in the counseling services on campus. Valerie Kisler-van Reede, interim director for the Center of Counseling and Student Development, said that while the center did have to give some money back due to budget issues last year, it did not cause them to lose any positions. In fact, they have gained new positions this year.

In response to possible problems with future budgets, Kisler-van Reede said, "I don't see it as a concern because I believe the university sees the counseling center and the services here as a high priority."

This is good news, considering the most recent data from the American College Health Association. In their reported findings from their fall 2008 survey on mental health, at some point in the last 12 months, 47 percent of college students surveyed "felt things were hopeless" while 87 percent felt "overwhelmed by all they had to do."

These high percentage results seem to be the trend in the data gathered by the survey, with as much as 31 percent of college students reporting in the last 12 months they felt "so depressed that it was difficult to function."

While the number of students who had seriously considered suicide in the past year was considerably lower, the percentage was still quite high at 6.4.

For the benefit of all institutions wanting to see how they measure up in terms of mental health services and to better gauge the needs of students, a new set of data is being gathered.

Center for the Study of Collegiate Mental Health, as reported by the project's executive director, Dr. Ben Locke in the November 2009 edition of Monitor on Psychology, will be the largest data set ever created of students receiving counseling services. The aim is to give counselors and researchers the ability to track their own progress compared with other centers. It will also give them the ability to examine national data on student mental health trends in real time.

Data gathered by the new center will help to fill a void and allow college mental health services that are underfunded to make a strong case for more funding and, hopefully, emphasize the need for more institutions to place a high priority on such services.

This writer can be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com.