The kids are (mostly) all right
IN RECENTLY RAISING a fee that pays for student services, University of California officials cited "the serious and urgent need for enhanced mental health services" on the system's 10 campuses. Students today suffer "so much stress," Elizabeth Downing, head of the UC Santa Barbara health center, told The Times last week, and the UC Student Mental Health Committee reported that "students are presenting mental health issues with greater frequency and complexity." About 43% of the revenue generated by the higher fee will go to treating such problems.
These concerns are not confined to California. College counselors across the nation face "an entirely new scale of difficulty" as "the number of students with depression has doubled, the number of suicidal students has tripled and sexual assaults have gone up fourfold," the American Federation of Teachers reported in its monthly On Campus magazine.
Jean Twenge, San Diego State psychologist and author of the much-quoted "Generation Me," goes further: Today's students are more miserable, lonely, narcissistic, self-centered and materialistic largely because school curriculums artificially inject young people with unmerited "self-esteem" at the expense of demanding real achievement.
But our most reliable long-term surveys and public health measures show that students today are no more plagued with mental problems that their predecessors and that claims of a "campus mental health crisis" may be overblown.
Since 1966, UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute has annually surveyed hundreds of thousands of first-year college students, publishing its findings in the American Freshman. According to the institute's surveys, the percentage of college freshmen who described themselves as "frequently depressed" has fallen substantially over the last two decades, from a peak of 11% in 1988 to lows of 7% in 2005 and 2006. The percentages of students who felt overwhelmed by academic obligations rose through the late 1990s but have since declined. Campus counseling center statistics are inconsistent and limited, but those available show that the percentages of students using them to be fairly stable.
More generally, public health and law enforcement statistics reveal that rates of suicide have fallen by 50%, and rates of other self-destructive deaths (drugs, poisons and hangings, accidental deaths from guns and deaths of undetermined intent) by more than 60% among California teenagers and young adults over the last 35 years. Students seem particularly safe from lethal dangers. The 2003 Big Ten study of 12 Midwestern campuses found annual suicide rates -- 7.5 per 100,000 students age 18 to 24 -- were half the national rate for that age group.
