Katecat, Adobe Stock Images The college experience has traditionally been thought of as idyllic years of sorority and fraternity parties, football games, hijinks, and finding the right one with whom to share your life. That’s not the way it is today for an alarming number of students. Many are increasingly struggling emotionally, according to the headlines, statistics, administrators, and surveys. Because of this, institutions of higher learning are forced to address problems for which they were not designed.
An extensive survey of nearly 1 million college students by Healthy Minds Network, based at the University of Michigan and Boston University, revealed that, for 2023-24, 19 percent of students suffered from “severe” depression, 16 percent from severe anxiety, 13 percent from some manner of eating disorder, and 13 percent from some manner of suicide ideation. An earlier Healthy Minds survey discovered that antidepressant drug use by college students rose from 8 percent in 2007 to 15.3 percent in 2018-19—the trend has been going on for a long time, preceding the Covid crisis that often is blamed for young people’s struggles with mental health. Today, the rate for antidepressant use among college students stands at 22 percent.
Something is going very wrong when so many young people struggle to cope with adult life. Furthermore, the more recent Healthy Minds study reported that 54 percent of college students said that they had sought some kind of mental-health counseling from a professional at some point in their lives, 36 percent within the last year. And, in one alarming sequence of events that occurred in 2022 and 2023, a total of 12 North Carolina State University students committed suicide (five of them when school was not in session).
Much of the problem goes far beyond anything that can be handled on campus. There is something of a gap between the sexes when it comes to student mental health. While the Healthy Minds survey did not report differences in antidepressant use between the sexes, it is generally accepted that women use them at least twice as commonly as men. A U.S. News & World Report survey discovered that, while 59 percent of male students reported struggling with their mental health in college, a whopping 77 percent of female students did the same.
The list of such disturbing trends is a long one. Clearly, something is going very wrong when so many young people—particularly those who are considered to be high-achievers—so frequently struggle to cope with going to college and adult life.
The reasons for this upsurge in the need for mental-health care are myriad. Yet the news may not be entirely bad; there is less stigma about and more awareness of the need for treatment, according to Healthy Minds. More students who need help are getting it, and that’s a good thing.
But that hardly explains everything. Much of the problem goes far beyond anything that can be handled on campus. Adolescence has become more difficult to navigate for many young people since the 1960s, when traditions and morals that evolved over many millennia and worked quite well started breaking down—and academia has often led the way in this cultural collapse. Educators are often no longer a voice of reason but politicized change agents. Advertisers and the entertainment world promote a vision of life as a series of limitless choices, including a sense that one need not suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Yet there are also strains of youth culture that present life as perpetually dark and hopeless. Neither perspective is grounded in the sort of reality impressionable young minds need for proper growth.
In a world in which technology plays a massive role, there is often a denial of the need to live normally and naturally. Traditions, such as sex and family roles, that are so old they are embedded in our DNA are rejected for wildly speculative projections with questionable potential for success. Consumption of highly processed non-food and non-drink is the norm for many students. Drug use is rampant, from powerful prescriptions for conditions such as ADHD (as well as anxiety and depression) to performance-enhancing steroids and stimulants to a vast array of recreational drugs, such as marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, and so on. These trends should be viewed with alarm; we are, after all, living organisms, and our mental states are influenced by our biology.
The Education Advisory Board, a large educational consulting firm, suggests that parenting styles also contribute to healthcare problems among students, stating that “highly involved parenting creates busy, over-scheduled, failure-adverse students who struggle to adapt to challenges as they arise in college.” But that hyper-concerned mode of modern parenting is hardly the worst. Many parents have bought into the modern psychological zeitgeist that goes against nature. Young people are encouraged to question their sexuality—including whether they are, in fact, the sex they were born as. Some struggle to form a healthy identity under the weight of the massive guilt placed on their shoulders for society’s past sins. Others grow up fearing impending doom from such debatable claims as apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming.
Young people grow up fearing impending doom from such debatable claims as apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming. Other parents allow their children to be raised by the Internet, where troubled peers and predatory adults are waiting to pounce. Students are glued to computer and phone screens, sometimes locked into fantasy worlds, absorbing flickering lights that rewire brain patterns and wreak havoc on attention spans.
The intellectual atmosphere in education also instills a certain kind of cognitive dissonance in students. On one hand, students are taught according to an intensely empirical tradition; the natural world is deterministic, and even in humans this determinism operates at a deep, physical level. Yet, in the next breath, students are taught that biology does not matter, even to the point where they can change their biologically determined sex almost on a whim. College can be a hyper-competitive undertaking, yet students are also subjected to an egalitarian mindset. They are sometimes induced to think of themselves as an elite, yet many of them can do little of real value to humanity and are often ill-prepared for basic adulthood.
Students are induced to think of themselves as an elite, yet many of them can do little of real value to humanity. Combine these problems and more with all the ordinary adolescent struggles, and it is no surprise that there is a campus mental-health problem. Campus counseling centers have suffered increased usage for decades. In the last year or so, there are some reports that this is starting to taper off and even decline. Still, the level of demand for such services remains high.
Academia’s response to this psychological minefield is checkered. For the most part, it appears to be trying to help. Resources are increasingly devoted to student mental health, new programs are funded, and greater awareness is promoted. Services offered include in-person, virtual, and phone counseling, connecting students to area healthcare professionals. In North Carolina, in 2023, then-governor Roy Cooper announced $7.7 million in new funding to support North Carolina’s postsecondary institutions in providing additional mental-health services to students. More recently, the state has begun directing another $5 million toward “Mental Health First Aid Training,” in which both school employees and students take short courses in how to identify others who are having problems and how to counsel them or encourage them to seek further help.
There is also a new spirit of “in loco parentis” on American campuses. More pressure is being put on academic institutions to handle problems that were previously dealt with by families. Once, colleges’ parental role was largely disciplinary: break the rules and face your punishment. Then the concept disappeared for several decades. But the “school as parent” mindset has returned, only in a twisted version of parenting that has produced emotionally troubled students. The tactics in question can be merely superficial or, perhaps, annoying. Some schools, such as UNC-Chapel Hill, place posters or “hope signs” with messages such as “Reach Out. Help is Here.” Such things likely accomplish little, except, perhaps, to make college seem like some kind of psychological obstacle course.
Even worse, schools often react to stressed-out students in early adulthood as if they were placating small children. For instance, students are at times encouraged to play with children’s toys such as Play-Doh, coloring books, and Legos (a common excuse for breaking out the toys was the second election of Donald Trump). And it has even become commonplace for schools to bring petting zoos and therapy animals to campus during finals week so students can “de-stress.”
A similar trend is giving permission to students to be accompanied by “emotional-support animals” on campus. Unlike service animals for students who are blind or otherwise severely impaired, emotional-support animals are not permitted in classrooms. Still, under federal Fair Housing Act rules, tenants have a right to be accompanied by an emotional-support animal in their homes, even in buildings that prohibit pets. These rules apply to most types of housing, and universities are not exempt. In the 2025 State of the Student Housing Industry Report, 3 percent of schools surveyed reported that 10 percent or more of their on-campus students had emotional-support animals, 9 percent of schools reported that between 6 percent and 10 percent of students had one, and 22 percent reported that between 3 percent and 5 percent of students had one.
Given such infantilization and other questionable practices, the new “therapeutic campus” may be perpetuating problems rather than curing them. The missing element is the development of resilience. But what is that? How is it induced?
The new therapeutic campus may be perpetuating rather than curing problems. In a practical sense, resilience is putting one foot after another toward a sensible or necessary goal, while ignoring, handling, or rejecting negative possibilities. It sounds so easy—to one who is thinking and acting rationally. But to a troubled mind it can sound as foreign as the air is to the proverbial fish that has spent its entire life in the depths of the ocean. It is not something easily explained to somebody whose mind is not open or receptive. And it is not merely a matter of understanding; once grasped, it must be performed repeatedly until it is second nature.
At worst, colleges are encouraging troubled students to go deeper into their instability. The mind is most open to such a process when very young. Many of today’s childrearing practices inhibit this formation, including “helicopter parenting,” which attempts to smooth over all of one’s offspring’s hurdles. The same goes for those parents who permit and even patronize their children’s flight into fantasy worlds (whether that means video games or transgender fixations) and those who go running to the medicine cabinet for each bout of their child’s sadness or anxiety.
Colleges were not designed to reverse the effects of poor parenting. For the most part, all colleges can do is to treat symptoms, not causes. At worst, they are encouraging troubled students to go deeper into their instability. It may be possible that, in the rush to satisfy students’ “needs” to treat anxiety and depression, colleges are over-medicating and avoiding better, more natural long-term solutions. Too often, young people are told that the solution to their emotional problems is to further express their individuality in a world of seemingly endless choice. It would be better if their choices were constrained to those most likely to produce healthy adults: self-discipline, regular habits, realistic expectations and life goals, physical fitness, a reduction in screen time, and less time spent in the fictional worlds of video games and anime. At Baylor University in Texas, students are sent text messages about eight topic areas: “sleep, spiritual wellness and faith formation, resilience, health and risk, physical activity and exercise, nutrition, healthy relationships, and anxiety.” Such reminders may be as useful as million-dollar programs—or perhaps not useful at all.
The problem of student mental health will not be solved overnight. It is a societal problem that has been increasing and is likely to continue to increase as long as our society bases policies on egalitarian fallacies. No single policy or treatment practice will reverse this trend; it is the direction the entire country has been moving in for decades. Eventually, the mindset of at least part of the nation will change so that we will begin to produce more resilient, more common-sensical children. There is likely to be some bifurcation; one part of our polarized nation will undergo the transition, while the rest will continue down the same path it is on now. Only time will tell how it all plays out.
College is a place for developing mature, wise, and productive adults, not for locking young people into perpetual childhood. For now, at the very least, let’s knock off the Play-Doh and petting zoos!
Jay Schalin is a senior fellow at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Author
Jay Schalin
