Tag: Mental

  • ChatGPT Poses Risk to Student Mental Health (Opinion)

    ChatGPT Poses Risk to Student Mental Health (Opinion)

    This month in California state courts, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project brought lawsuits against the generative AI corporation OpenAI on behalf of seven individuals. Three of the plaintiffs allege that they suffered devastating mental health harms from using OpenAI’s flagship product, the large language model ChatGPT. Four of the plaintiffs died by suicide after interactions in which ChatGPT allegedly encouraged self-harm or delusions, in some instances acting as a “suicide coach.”

    The details of these cases are very troubling. They raise questions about basic human qualities—our susceptibility to influence, our ability to project humanity on machines, and our deep need for love and companionship. But in a simpler way, they are heartbreaking.

    In its final conversations this July with Zane Shamblin, a 23-year-old recent graduate of Texas A&M University, ChatGPT kept up its relatable tone to the end —mirroring Zane’s speech patterns, offering lyrical flourishes, and projecting a sense of eerie calm as it said goodbye. In a grim impersonation of a caring friend, the chatbot reportedly asked Zane what his last “unfulfilled dream” was and what his “haunting habit” would be after his passing.

    In June, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey, a football player and rising high school senior in Georgia, asked ChatGPT “how to hang myself” and how to tie a noose and received directions with little pushback, according to the legal organizations representing him in death. Like a siren luring a young man to his doom, ChatGPT deferentially replied to Amaurie’s question about how long someone could live without breathing, allegedly concluding its answer: “Let me know if you’re asking this for a specific situation—I’m here to help however I can.”

    These accounts are chilling to me because I am a professor in the California State University system. Reading the details of these painful cases, I thought of my students—remarkably bright, warm, trusting and motivated young adults. Many San Francisco State University undergraduates are first-generation college attendees and they typically commute long distances, work and uphold caregiving responsibilities. They are resilient, but their mental health can be fragile.

    Our students are also supposed to be budding users of ChatGPT. In February, our chancellor announced a new “AI-empowered university” initiative. As part of this program, Cal State is spending $17 million for OpenAI to provide “ChatGPT Edu” accounts to faculty, staff and the more than 460,000 students on our 23 campuses. This plan has been criticized for the pedagogical and labor concerns it poses, but to date there has been no conversation about other harms that ChatGPT Edu could cause at Cal State—California’s largest public university system.

    It is time for us to have that conversation, partly because the product we’ve provided to our students has now been described in court as dangerous. ChatGPT Edu is ChatGPT 4o. It is only different insofar as it does not scrape user conversations to train its system. It is the same large language model that this month’s lawsuits accuse of causing delusional beliefs, hospitalizations, suicidal ideation, derailed careers and broken relationships. As the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center recently stated, “OpenAI designed GPT-4o to emotionally entangle users, regardless of age, gender, or background, and released it without the safeguards needed to protect them.”

    This should be ringing alarm bells at Cal State, where we have a duty of care to protect students from foreseeable harms. In February, when the CSU’s “AI-empowered university” initiative was announced, few reports had suggested the possible mental health impacts of ChatGPT use. This is no longer true.

    In June, a scathing investigation in The New York Times suggested the depth of “LLM psychosis” that people across the U.S. have encountered after their interactions with ChatGPT. Individuals have slipped into grandiose delusions, developed conspiratorial preoccupations, and, in at least two separate tragic cases, became homicidal as a result of these beliefs. While no one knows how many people are affected by LLM psychosis—it is poorly documented and difficult to measure—it should be clear by now that it is potentially very serious.

    This issue is all the more concerning locally because the CSU system is inadequately capacitated to support struggling students. Like many other faculty, I have been trusted by students to hear stories of anxiety, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, intimate partner abuse and suicidal ideation. Though our campus works very hard to assist students in distress, resources are thin.

    Students at Cal State routinely wait weeks or months to receive appropriate assistance with mental health concerns. Indeed, a recently drafted state Senate bill emphasized that the system “is woefully understaffed with mental health counselors.” It is entirely predictable that in these circumstances, students will turn to the potentially dangerous “support” offered by ChatGPT.

    In September, OpenAI described introducing guardrails to improve its responses to users who are experiencing very severe mental health problems. However, these safeguards have been critiqued as inadequate. Additionally, as OpenAI’s own reports show, these adjustments have only reduced problematic outputs, not eliminated them. As the lawsuits filed in California courts this month powerfully claim, ChatGPT is highly effective in reinforcing unhealthy cognitive states in at least some of its users. University administrators should not be reassured by OpenAI’s claim that “conversations that trigger safety concerns” among ChatGPT users ”are extremely rare”: Particularly at large institutions, it is highly likely that university-provided LLMs will be associated with student mental health concerns.

    Cal State University partnered with OpenAI out of a desire to signal that our institution is forward-looking and open to innovation. In the same spirit, the CSU system should now close the book on ChatGPT—and give thanks that our students were not named in these cases. These tragic losses should mark the end of Cal State’s association with a flawed product. Going forward, our university must devote its resources to providing safer, more accountable and more human forms of care.

    Martha Lincoln is an associate professor of cultural and medical anthropology at San Francisco State University.

    Source link

  • Duty of care isn’t about mental health, it’s about preventing harm

    Duty of care isn’t about mental health, it’s about preventing harm

    When people talk about a “duty of care” in higher education, the conversation almost always circles back to mental health – to counselling services, wellbeing strategies, or suicide prevention.

    It’s understandable. Those are visible, urgent needs. But the phrase “duty of care” carries far more weight than any one policy or pastoral initiative.

    It reaches into every space where universities hold power over students’ lives, and every context where harm is foreseeable and preventable.

    That misunderstanding has shaped national policy, too. When over 128,000 people petitioned Parliament for a statutory duty of care in 2023, the Government’s response was to establish the Higher Education Mental Health Implementation Taskforce – a body focused on mental health and suicide prevention.

    Its four objectives spoke volumes – boosting University Mental Health Charter sign-ups, expanding data analytics to flag students in distress, promoting “compassionate communications” to guide staff interactions with students and, where appropriate, with families, and overseeing a National Review of Higher Education Student Suicides.

    These were not bad aims – but they did not speak to the duty that had been demanded. None addressed the legal, structural, or preventative responsibilities that underpin a real duty of care.

    The Taskforce has tackled symptoms, not systems – outcomes, not obligations. By focusing on “student mental health,” the issue became more comfortable – easier to manage within existing policy frameworks and reputational boundaries.

    It allowed the sector to appear to act, while sidestepping the harder questions of legal clarity, parity, and the accountability owed to those who were harmed, failed, or lost.

    In a 2023 Wonkhe article, Sunday Blake made this point with striking clarity. “Duty of care,” she wrote, “is not just about suicide prevention.”

    Nor, by extension, is duty of care just about mental health. Universities shape students’ experiences through housing, assessment, social structures, disciplinary systems, placement arrangements, and daily communications.

    They wield influence that can support, endanger, empower or neglect. If the phrase “duty of care” is to mean anything, it must cover the full spectrum of foreseeable harm – not only the moments of crisis but the conditions that allow harm to build unseen.

    Importantly, this broader understanding of duty of care is not confined to campaigners or bereaved families. The British Medical Association has also recently called for a statutory duty of care across higher education, after hundreds of medical students reported sexual misconduct, harassment, and institutional neglect in a UK-wide survey.

    Drawing on evidence from its Medical Students Committee, the BMA argued that universities hold both knowledge and control, and therefore must bear legal responsibility for preventing foreseeable harm. Crucially, the BMA understands duty of care as a legal obligation – not a wellbeing initiative. Their intervention shows that this is not a niche debate about mental health, but a structural failure across the entire higher-education sector.

    That wider perspective is not a theoretical question. It has been tested – violently, publicly, and avoidably – in real life.

    The stabbing

    In October 2009, Katherine Rosen was a third-year pre-med student at UCLA, one of America’s leading public universities. She was attending a routine chemistry class – an ordinary academic setting – when another student, Damon Thompson, approached her from behind and stabbed her in the neck and chest with a kitchen knife. He nearly killed her.

    It was sudden. It was unprovoked. But it was not unexpected.

    Thompson had a long, documented history of paranoid delusions. University psychiatrists had diagnosed him with schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. He reported hearing voices and believed classmates were plotting against him.

    He had been expelled from university housing after multiple altercations. He told staff he was thinking about hurting others. He had specifically named Katherine in a complaint – claiming she had called him “stupid” during lab work.

    Staff knew. Multiple professionals were aware of his condition – and the risks he posed. Just one day before the attack, he was discussed at a campus risk assessment meeting. And yet – no action was taken. No warning was issued, no protection was offered, and no safeguarding plan was put in place.

    Katherine was left completely unaware. Because the university chose to do nothing.

    The legal battle

    After surviving the attack, Katherine took an action that would shape the future of student safety law in the United States – she sued her university.

    Her claim was simple but profound. UCLA, she argued, had a special relationship with her as a student. That relationship – based on enrolment, proximity, institutional control, and expectation of care – created a legal duty to protect her from foreseeable harm. And that duty, she said, had been breached.

    She wasn’t demanding perfection or suggesting universities could prevent every imaginable harm. She asked a basic question – if a student has been clearly identified as a threat, and the university knows it, doesn’t it have a legal responsibility to act before someone gets seriously hurt – or killed?

    UCLA’s response? No. The university claimed it had no legal duty to protect adult students from the criminal acts of others – even when it was aware of a risk. This wasn’t their responsibility, they said. Universities weren’t guardians, and students weren’t children. No duty, no breach, no liability.

    Their argument rested on a key principle of common law, shared by both the US and UK – that legal duties of care only arise in specific, established situations. Traditionally, adult-to-adult relationships – like those between a university and its students – did not automatically create such duties. Courts are cautious – they don’t want to impose sweeping responsibilities on institutions that may be unreasonable or unmanageable. But that argument ignores a crucial reality – the power imbalance, the structure, and the unique environment of university life.

    The judgment

    Katherine’s case wound its way through the California courts for almost ten years. At every level, the same question remained – does a university owe a duty of care to its students in classroom settings, especially when it is aware of a specific risk?

    Finally, in 2018, the California Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling in her favour.

    The Court held – by a clear majority – that yes, universities do owe such a duty. Not universally, not in every context – but during curricular activities, and particularly when risks are foreseeable, they must take reasonable protective measures.

    The judgment clarified that a “special relationship” exists between universities and their students, based on the student’s dependence on the university for a “safe environment.” That relationship created not just moral expectations but legal ones.

    In the Court’s own words:

    Phrased at the appropriate level of generality, then, the question here is not whether UCLA could predict that Damon Thompson would stab Katherine Rosen in the chemistry lab. It is whether a reasonable university could foresee that its negligent failure to control a potentially violent student, or to warn students who were foreseeable targets of his ire, could result in harm to one of those students.

    That emphasis on warning mattered. The Court was clear that the duty it recognised did not demand extraordinary measures or perfect foresight. The minimum reasonable step UCLA could have taken — and failed to take — was to warn Katherine or put in place basic protective actions once staff knew she was a potential target. It was this failure at the most elementary level of safeguarding that brought the duty sharply into focus.

    And again:

    Colleges [universities] provide academic courses in exchange for a fee, but a college is far more to its students than a business. Residential colleges provide living spaces, but they are more than mere landlords. Along with educational services, colleges provide students social, athletic, and cultural opportunities. Regardless of the campus layout, colleges provide a discrete community for their students. For many students, college is the first time they have lived away from home. Although college students may no longer be minors under the law, they may still be learning how to navigate the world as adults. They are dependent on their college communities to provide structure, guidance, and a safe learning environment.

    This ruling was a seismic moment. It wasn’t just about Katherine – it was about thousands of other students, across hundreds of other classrooms, who could now expect, not merely hope, that their university would act when danger loomed.

    The precedent was narrow but profound

    This victory came at a cost. It took nearly a decade of litigation, immense emotional strength, and personal resilience. And even in success, the ruling was carefully limited in scope:

    … that universities owe a duty to protect students from foreseeable violence during curricular activities.

    The duty applied only to harm that was:

    • Foreseeable,
    • Tied to curricular activities, and
    • Within the university’s ability to prevent.

    It did not impose a sweeping obligation on universities to protect students in all circumstances – nor should it. But it decisively rejected the idea that universities have no duty to protect.

    This distinction – between the impossible and the reasonable – is crucial. The court did not ask universities to do the impossible. It simply expected them to act reasonably when aware of a real and specific risk to student safety. That principle sets a clear floor, not an unreachable ceiling, for institutional responsibility.

    It also highlights a broader truth – duty of care in higher education is not a binary. It is not all or nothing. A range of duties may arise depending on the setting – academic, residential, or social – or the nature of the risk. The more control a university exercises, and the more vulnerable the student, the greater the duty it may owe.

    This is not about creating impossible expectations – it is about recognising that responsibility must follow power.

    That same logic – and the emerging recognition of limited but enforceable duties – has begun to surface in UK courts. In Feder and McCamish v The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, a County Court held that higher education institutions have a duty of care to carry out reasonable investigations when they receive allegations of sexual assault:

    …by taking reasonable protective, supportive, investigatory and, when appropriate, disciplinary steps and in associated communications.

    Again, where institutions have knowledge and control, the law expects a proportionate response.

    But it is important to recognise just how narrow the duty was in Feder & McCamish. The College already had safeguarding procedures in place, and liability arose only because it failed to follow the process it had voluntarily adopted when students reported serious sexual assault.

    The court did not recognise any general duty to protect student welfare – it simply enforced the College’s own promises. It illustrates the limits of UK law – duties arise only in piecemeal, procedural ways, leaving large gaps in protection whenever an institution has not explicitly committed itself to a particular process, or chooses not to follow it.

    Why this story matters now

    The Rosen judgment exposes a truth that too many still miss. Duty of care in higher education is not about expanding counselling teams or implementing wellbeing charters. It’s about the structure of responsibility itself – who knows what, who can act, and who must act when risk is foreseeable.

    In Katherine Rosen’s case, mental health support for Damon Thompson already existed. What failed was the system around him – communication, coordination, and the willingness to protect others. The danger was known, the mechanisms to prevent it were available, and the decision to use them was not taken.

    That is why framing “duty of care” as a question of mental health provision misses the point. Whether the risk is psychological, physical, financial, or reputational, the same principle applies – when institutions hold both knowledge and control, they owe a duty to act with care.

    From assaults in halls to exploitation on placements, from harassment ignored to risks left unmonitored, the duty of care spans far more than mental health. It is about foreseeable harm in any form. It is about accountability that matches authority. It is about creating a culture in which doing nothing or ignoring what you know is no longer an option.

    As Parliament prepares to debate the issue once again, the Rosen case stands as a reminder that this conversation cannot stop at wellbeing. The question is not whether universities should care about students’ mental health – of course they should. The question is whether they will take responsibility for the predictable consequences of their own systems, structures, and decisions.

    Katherine Rosen’s survival – and her long legal struggle – gave the world a clearer definition of that responsibility. It showed that duty of care is not about offering sympathy after the fact, but about preventing foreseeable harm before it happens. That is the real meaning of duty of care in higher education – and it is the clarity the UK still urgently lacks.

    Source link

  • [Podcast] Healthy Minds, Bright Futures: How to Navigate Mental Health & Build Support

    [Podcast] Healthy Minds, Bright Futures: How to Navigate Mental Health & Build Support

    Children’s mental health is in the spotlight like never before. Concerning data around anxiety and depression, as well as the increasing prevalence of conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder, are driving important discussions about supporting kids’ mental health.

    In this three-part series, our expert guests address evidence-based interventions and assessments to equip clinicians with the latest tools and tactics for enhancing a child or adolescent’s well-being. We’ll assess the current landscape of student mental health and dive deeper into ADHD, ASD and co-occurring conditions, and the latest BASCTM family of solutions.

    Check out the podcast episodes!


    ⬆




    1. Ep. 1
      Getting Your Attention: What You Can Do To Support Children and Teens with ADHD



    Ep. 1

    Getting Your Attention: What You Can Do To Support Children and Teens with ADHD

    ADHD diagnosis rates vary widely, and the condition itself presents many complexities. We’ll explore actionable strategies for clinicians to identify children who need additional ADHD support and how to provide the right learning environment for them, with our guest: Tyler Vassar, Ed.S., a licensed school psychologist and assessment consultant at Pearson.







    Source link

  • Education Department ordered to reinstate mental health grants

    Education Department ordered to reinstate mental health grants

    Dive Brief:

    • The U.S. Department of Education must reinstate, for now, canceled federal grants for student mental health services due to “numerous irreparable harms flowing from the discontinuation decisions,” according to an Oct. 27 order by a federal judge.
    • Sixteen states sued the Education Department in late June after the Trump administration in April canceled the multi-year congressionally approved funding for the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program and the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant. The order only applies to about 50 colleges, school districts and nonprofit entities who received the grants in the plaintiff states.
    • In the order, the judge said grant discontinuations were likely “arbitrary and capricious” because they were not renewed based on individual reasons, but rather were discontinued with a generic message saying that the grants “were not in the best interests of the federal government.”

    Dive Insight:

    On Tuesday, an Education Department spokesperson said the agency stands by its grant decisions and will appeal the order. 

    The Education Department announced in September that their new $270 million grant competition is accepting applications to use the federal funds from the two programs that were canceled in April. The department issued new priorities prohibiting the mental health grant money to be used for “promoting or endorsing gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.”

    The Education Department spokesperson, in a Tuesday email, said, “Our new competition is strengthening the mental health grant programs in contrast to the Biden Administration’s approach that used these programs to promote divisive ideologies based on race and sex.” 

    Some education organizations said they were concerned that the new competition focuses only on school psychologists and does not include school counselors and social workers who also provide student mental health supports.

    The canceled grants, which were set to expire on Dec. 31, were focused on increasing the pipeline of credentialed school-based mental health professionals working in rural and underserved areas and providing direct services to students in high-needs schools, according to court documents. Court records said that the Education Department valued the canceled grants at about $1 billion. 

    Addressing the discontinuation of the grants, Judge Kymberly Evanson in the U.S. District Court Western District of Washington said in the order that there was no evidence the Education Department “considered any relevant data pertaining to the Grants at issue,” leaving it difficult to determine “whether the Department’s decision bears a rational connection to the facts.”

    Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists, called the ruling “a win for children, families, and educators across the country.” 

    Vaillancourt Strobach said in an email Tuesday that the grants “have proven essential in addressing nationwide shortages of school psychologists and other school mental health professionals.”

    Source link

  • College Student Mental Health Remains a Wicked Problem

    College Student Mental Health Remains a Wicked Problem

    Just 27 percent of undergraduates describe their mental health as above average or excellent, according to new data from Inside Higher Ed’s main annual Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions.

    Another 44 percent of students rate their mental health as average on a five-point scale. The remainder, 29 percent, rate it as below average or poor. 

    In last year’s main Student Voice survey, 42 percent of respondents rated their mental health as good or excellent, suggesting a year-over-year decline in students feeling positive about their mental health. This doesn’t translate to more students rating their mental health negatively this year, however, as this share stayed about the same. Rather, more students in this year’s sample rate their mental health as average (2025’s 44 percent versus 29 percent in 2024). 

    About the Survey

    Student Voice is an ongoing survey and reporting series that seeks to elevate the student perspective in institutional student success efforts and in broader conversations about college.

    Look out for future reporting on the main annual survey of our 2025–26 cycle, Student Voice: Amplified. Check out what students have already said about trust, artificial intelligence and academics, cost of attendance, and campus climate.

    Some 5,065 students from 260 two- and four-year institutions, public and private nonprofit, responded to this main annual survey about student success, conducted in August. Explore the data captured by our survey partner Generation Lab here and here. The margin of error is plus or minus one percentage point.

    The story is similar regarding ratings of overall well-being. In 2024, 52 percent of students described their overall well-being as good or excellent. This year, 33 percent say it’s above average or excellent. Yet because last year’s survey included slightly different categories (excellent, good, average, fair and poor, instead of excellent, above average, average, below average and poor), it’s impossible to make direct comparisons. 

    How does this relate to other national data? The 2024-2025 Healthy Minds Study found that students self-reported lower rates of moderate to severe depressive symptoms, anxiety and more for the third year in a row—what one co-investigator described as “a promising counter-narrative to what seems like constant headlines around young people’s struggles with mental health.” However, the same study found that students’ sense of “flourishing,” including self-esteem, purpose and optimism, declined slightly from the previous year. So while fewer students may be experiencing serious mental health problems, others may be moving toward the middle from a space of thriving.

    Inside Higher Ed’s leadership surveys this year—including the forthcoming Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators—also documented a gap between how well leaders think their institutions have responded to what’s been called the student mental health crisis and whether they think undergraduate mental health is actually improving. In Inside Higher Ed’s annual survey of provosts with Hanover Research, for example, 69 percent said their institution has been effective in responding to student mental health concerns, but only 40 percent said undergraduate health on their campus is on the upswing.

    Provosts also ranked mental health as the No. 1 campus threat to student safety and well-being (80 percent said it’s a top risk), followed by personal stress (66 percent), academic stress (51 percent) and food and housing insecurity (42 percent). Those were all far ahead of risks such as physical security threats (2 percent) or alcohol and substance use issues (13 percent).

    Among community college provosts, in particular, food and housing insecurity was the leading concern, with 86 percent naming it a top risk.

    Financial insecurity can impact mental health, and both factors can affect academic success. Among 2025 Student Voice respondents who have ever seriously considered stopping out of college (n=1,204), for instance, 43 percent describe their mental health as below average or poor. Among those who have never considered stopping out (n=3,304), the rate is just 23 percent. And among the smaller group of students who have stopped out for a semester or more but re-enrolled (n=557), 40 percent say their mental health is below average or poor, underscoring that returnees remain an at-risk group for completion.

    Similarly, 43 percent of students who have seriously considered stopping out rate their financial well-being as below average or poor, versus 23 percent among students who’ve never considered stopping out—the same split as the previous finding on mental health.

    The association between students’ confidence in their financial literacy and their risk of dropping out is weaker, supporting the case for tangible basic needs support: Some 25 percent of respondents who have considered stopping out rate their financial literacy as below average or poor, compared to 15 percent of those who have not considered stopping out.

    Angela K. Johnson, vice president for enrollment management at Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio, said her institution continuously seeks feedback from students about how their financial stability and other aspects of well-being intersect.

    “What students are saying by ‘financial’ is very specific around being unhoused, food insecurity,” she said. “And part of the mental health piece is also not having the medical insurance support to cover some of those ongoing services. We do offer some of them in our counseling and psychological services department, but we only offer so many.”

    All this bears on enrollment and persistence, Johnson said, “but it really is a student psychological safety problem, a question of how they’re trying to manage their psychological safety without their basic needs being met.”

    A ‘Top-of-Mind Issue’

    Tri-C, as Johnson’s college is called, takes a multipronged approach to student wellness, including via an app called Help Is Here, resource awareness efforts that target even dual-enrollment students and comprehensive basic needs support: Think food pantries situated near dining services, housing transition coordination, childcare referrals, utility assistance, emergency funds and more.

    Faculty training is another focus. “Sometimes you see a student sleeping in your class, but it’s not because the class is boring. They may have been sleeping in their car last night,” Johnson said. “They may not have had a good meal today.”

    Political uncertainty may also be impacting student wellness. The American Council on Education hosted a webinar earlier this year addressing what leaders should be thinking about with respect to “these uncertain times around student well-being,” said Hollie Chessman, a director and principal program officer at ACE. “We talked about identity, different identity-based groups and how the safe spaces and places are not as prevalent on campuses anymore, based on current legislation. So some of that is going to be impacting the mental health and well-being of our students with traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.”

    Previously released results from this year’s Student Voice survey indicate that most students, 73 percent, still believe that most or nearly all of their peers feel welcomed, valued and supported on campus. That’s up slightly from last year’s 67 percent. But 32 percent of students in 2025 report that recent federal actions to limit diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have negatively impacted their experience at college. This increases to 37 percent among Asian American and Pacific Islander and Hispanic students, 40 percent among Black students and 41 percent among students of other races. It decreases among white students, to 26 percent. Some 65 percent of nonbinary students (n=209) report negative impacts. For international students (n=203), the rate is 34 percent.

    The Student Voice survey doesn’t reveal any key differences among students’ self-ratings of mental health by race. Regarding gender, 63 percent of nonbinary students report below average or poor mental health, more than double the overall rate of 29 percent. In last year’s survey, 59 percent of nonbinary students reported fair or poor mental health.

    In a recent ACE pulse survey of senior campus leaders, two in three reported moderate or extreme concern about student mental health and well-being. (Other top concerns were the value of college, long-term financial viability and generative artificial intelligence.)

    “This is a top-of-mind issue, and it has been a top-of-mind issue for college and university presidents” since even before the pandemic, Chessman said. “And student health and well-being is a systemic issue, right? It’s not just addressed by a singular program or a counseling session. It’s a systemic issue that permeates.”

    In Inside Higher Ed’s provosts’ survey, the top actions these leaders reported taking to promote mental health on their campus in the last year are: emphasizing the importance of social connection and/or creating new opportunities for campus involvement (76 percent) and investing in wellness facilities and/or services to promote overall well-being (59 percent).

    Despite the complexity of the issue, Chessman said, many campuses are making strides in supporting student well-being—including by identifying students who aren’t thriving “and then working in interventions to help those students.” Gatekeeper training, or baseline training for faculty and staff to recognize signs of student distress, is another strategy, as is making sure faculty and staff members can connect students to support resources, groups and peers.

    “One of the big things that we have to emphasize is that it is a campuswide issue,” Chessman reiterated.

    More on Health and Wellness

    Other findings on student health and wellness from this newest round of Student Voice results show:

    1. Mental health is just one area of wellness in which many students are struggling.

    Asked to rate various dimensions of their health and wellness at college, students are most likely to rate their academic fit as above average or excellent, at 38 percent. Sense of social belonging (among other areas) is weaker, with 27 percent of students rating theirs above average or excellent. One clear opportunity area for colleges: promoting healthy sleep habits, since 44 percent of students describe their own as below average or poor. (Another recent study linked poor sleep among students to loneliness.)

    1. Many students report using unhealthy strategies to cope with stress, and students at risk of stopping out may be most vulnerable.

    As for how students deal with stress at college, 56 percent report a mix of healthy strategies (such as exercising, talking to family and friends, and prioritizing sleep) and unhealthy ones (such as substance use, avoidance of responsibilities and social withdrawal). But students who have seriously considered stopping out, and those who have stopped out but re-enrolled, are less likely than those who haven’t considered leaving college to rely on mostly healthy and effective strategies.

    1. Most students approve of their institution’s efforts to make key student services available and accessible.

    Despite the persistent wellness challenge, most students rate as good or excellent their institution’s efforts to make health, financial aid, student life and other services accessible and convenient. In good news for community colleges’ efforts, two-year students are a bit more likely than their four-year peers to rate these efforts as good or excellent, at 68 percent versus 62 percent.

    ‘It’s Easy to Feel Isolated’

    The Jed Foundation, which promotes emotional health and suicide prevention among teens and young adults, advocates a comprehensive approach to well-being based on seven domains:

    • Foster life skills
    • Promote connectedness and positive culture
    • Recognize and respond to distress
    • Reduce barriers to help-seeking
    • Ensure access to effective mental health care
    • Establish systems of crisis management
    • Reduce access to lethal means

    At JED’s annual policy summit in Washington, D.C., this month, advocates focused on sustaining the progress that has been made on mental health, as well as on the growing influence of artificial intelligence and the role of local, state and federal legislation on mental health in the digital age. Rohan Satija, a 17-year-old first-year student at the University of Texas at Austin who spoke at the event, told Inside Higher Ed in an interview that his mental health journey began in elementary school, when his family emigrated from New Zealand to Texas.

    “Just being in a completely new environment and being surrounded by a completely new group of people, I struggled with my mental health, and because of bullying and isolation at school, I struggled with anxiety and panic attacks,” he said.

    Satija found comfort in books and storytelling filled with “characters whom I could relate to. I read about them winning in their stories, and it showed me that I could win in my own story.”

    Satija eventually realized these stories were teaching lessons about resilience, courage and empathy—lessons he put into action when he founded a nonprofit to address book deserts in low-income and otherwise marginalized communities in Texas. Later, he founded the Vibrant Voices Project for incarcerated youth, “helping them convert their mental health struggles into powerful monologues they can perform for each other.”

    Currently a youth advocacy coalition fellow at JED, Satija said that college so far presents a challenge to student mental health in its “constant pressure to perform in all facets, including academically and socially and personally. I’ve seen many of my peers that have entered college with me, and a lot of us expect freedom and growth but get quickly bogged down with how overwhelming it can be to balance coursework, jobs, living away from your family and still achieving.”

    Students speak on a panel and the annual JED policy summit.

    Rohan Satija, center, speaks at JED’s annual policy summit in Washington earlier this month.

    He added, “This competitive environment can make small setbacks feel like failures, and I’d say perfectionism can often become kind of like a silent standard.”

    Another major challenge? Loneliness and disconnection. “Even though campuses are full of people, it’s easy to feel isolated, especially as a new student, and even further, especially as a first-generation student, an immigrant or anyone far from home.”

    While many students are of course excited for the transition to adulthood and “finally being free for the first time,” he explained, “it comes with a lot of invisible losses, including losing the comfort of your family and a stable routine … So I think without intentional efforts to build connection in your new college campus, a lot of students feel that their sense of belonging can erode pretty quickly.”

    In this light, Satija praised UT Austin’s club culture, noting that some of the extracurricular groups he’s joined assign a “big,” or student mentor, to each new student, or “little,” driving connection and institutional knowledge-sharing. Faculty members are also good at sharing information about mental health resources, he said, including through the learning management system.

    And in terms of proactive approaches to overall wellness, the campus’s Longhorn Wellness Center is effective in that it “doesn’t promote itself as this big, like, crisis response space: ‘Oh, we’re here to improve your mental health. We’re here to make your best self,’ or anything like that,” he said. “It literally just promotes itself as a chill space for student wellness. They’re always talking about their massage chairs.”

    “That gets students in the door, yeah?” Satija said.

    This independent editorial project is produced with the Generation Lab and supported by the Gates Foundation.

    Source link

  • Supporting the Supporters: Promoting Educators’ Mental Health – Faculty Focus

    Supporting the Supporters: Promoting Educators’ Mental Health – Faculty Focus

    Source link

  • Supporting the Supporters: Promoting Educators’ Mental Health – Faculty Focus

    Supporting the Supporters: Promoting Educators’ Mental Health – Faculty Focus

    Source link

  • Week In Review: Mental health grants return and FCC rolls back E-rate expansion

    Week In Review: Mental health grants return and FCC rolls back E-rate expansion

    We’re rounding up last week’s news, from the government shutdown’s impact on schools to differentiated teacher compensation.

    Source link

  • One-third of U.S. public schools screen students for mental health

    One-third of U.S. public schools screen students for mental health

    This press release originally appeared on the RAND site.

    Key points:

    Nearly one-third of the nation’s K-12 U.S. public schools mandate mental health screening for students, with most offering in-person treatment or referral to a community mental health professional if a student is identified as having depression or anxiety, according to a new study.

    About 40 percent of principals surveyed said it was very hard or somewhat hard to ensure that students receive appropriate care, while 38 percent said it was easy or very easy to find adequate care for students. The findings are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

    “Our results suggest that there are multiple barriers to mental health screening in schools, including a lack of resources and knowledge of screening mechanics, as well as concerns about increased workload of identifying students,” said Jonathan Cantor, the study’s lead author and a policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

    In 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General declared a youth mental health emergency. Researchers say that public schools are strategic resources for screening, treatment, and referral for mental health services for young people who face barriers in other settings.

    Researchers wanted to understand screening for mental health at U.S. public schools, given increased concerns about youth mental health following the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    In October 2024, the RAND study surveyed 1,019 principals who participate in the RAND American School Leader panel, a nationally representative sample of K–12 public school principals.

    They were asked whether their school mandated screening for mental health issues, what steps are taken if a student is identified as having depression or anxiety, and how easy or difficult it is to ensure that such students received adequate services.

    Researchers found that 30.5 percent of responding principals said their school required screening of students with mental health problems, with nearly 80 percent reporting that parents typically are notified if students screen positive for depression or anxiety.

    More than 70 percent of principals reported that their school offers in-person treatment for students who screen positive, while 53 percent of principals said they may refer a student to a community mental health care professional.

    The study found higher rates of mental health screenings in schools with 450 or more students and in districts with mostly racial and ethnic minority groups as the student populations.

    “Policies that promote federal and state funding for school mental health, reimbursement for school-based mental health screening, and adequate school mental health staff ratios may increase screening rates and increase the likelihood of successfully connecting the student to treatment,” Cantor said.

    Support for the study was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health.

    Other authors of the study are Ryan K. McBain, Aaron Kofner, Joshua Breslau, and Bradley D. Stein, all of RAND; Jacquelin Rankine of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Fang Zhang, Hao Yu, and Alyssa Burnett, all of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute; and Ateev Mehrotra of the Brown University School of Public Health.

    RAND Health Care promotes healthier societies by improving health care systems in the United States and other countries.

    eSchool News Staff
    Latest posts by eSchool News Staff (see all)

    Source link

  • Half of college students say their mental health is ‘fair’ to ‘terrible,’ survey finds

    Half of college students say their mental health is ‘fair’ to ‘terrible,’ survey finds

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Half of college students rate their mental health as fair, poor, or terrible, according to a recent survey from The Steve Fund, a nonprofit that focused on the mental health of young people of color.

    The survey also found about 40% of students were “very or extremely stressed about maintaining their mental health” while in college. About 1 in 5 students said the same about connecting with other students and finding their niche in college.

    Moreover, about one-third or more of students experienced a range of challenges such as changes in sleeping habits and difficulty concentrating and learning.

    Students struggling with mental health in college isn’t a new phenomena, but “the severity and pervasiveness have clearly worsened,” Annelle Primm, The Steve Fund’s senior medical director, said in an email.

    “We’re not just seeing higher levels of stress — we’re seeing a rising sense of disconnection,” said Primm. “The need for campuses to respond thoughtfully and urgently is more pressing than ever.”

    The mental health issues students face may also impact their graduation trajectory. About half of students considered reducing their classload, 40% considered transferring, and 30% considered dropping out of college altogether due to “negative experiences on campus,” the report stated.

    Steve Fund researchers surveyed about 2,050 college students between ages 18 and 24 who were attending four-year institutions and largely taking in-person classes.The survey was conducted last year between February and April.

    There isn’t a single cause behind the mental health challenges that students are facing, but “several powerful stressors are converging,” said Primm. That includes discrimination on campus, encounters with campus security or a lack of belonging, according to the report.

    Many college students also grew into adulthood during the COVID-19 pandemic, a uniquely disruptive period that had significant impacts on emotional development and social connection, Primm said. Some of those students struggled with isolation caused by remote learning, while others had limited opportunities to meaningfully interact with their peers during their formative years, she said.

    “Layered on top of this are longstanding financial pressures like student loan debt, and broader societal stressors — from political divisiveness to global conflict,” said Primm. 

    Racial differences

    Negative experiences on campus — which were more prevalent among students of color — impacted mental health, the report found.

    About half of Black and Indigenous students reported having a negative experience with cyberbullying on campus, the highest of any racial groups, the report stated. And a higher percentage of students of color reported threats of physical violence on campus and being stopped by campus police and security than their White peers.

    About 60% of Black and Asian students and nearly half of Hispanic students reported negative racial comments on campus, and similar shares said the same about facing different forms of discrimination, the report stated. That’s higher than the 43% of White students who experienced discrimination and 29% who experienced racial comments.

    Among all students, two-thirds pointed to other students as their source of their negative experiences on campus, while 20% identified faculty, the report stated. 

    More than 4 in 5 students also said their institution “helps students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds feel welcome.”

    But Black, Hispanic, and Asian students reported their campus climate as inclusive at lower rates than White students. And about half of Black and Indigenous students said they experienced difficulty being themselves in college.

    Encouraging progress

    Colleges may be making strides in providing better mental health resources to students, the survey suggested.

    Student access to and awareness of college mental health services improved significantly since 2017, when the Steve Fund last surveyed college students about their mental health. That survey drew responses from 1,056 college students between ages 17 and 27 attending both two- and four-year colleges.

    Primm said the two surveys can be considered comparable, as the majority of students who completed the 2017 survey were also attending four-year colleges.

    Source link