The ongoing mental health crisis is affecting students at universities nationwide, and Portland State is no exception. Mental illness seriously impacts the lives of countless students, and the college they attend is usually the first line of support.
It’s time for PSU to recognize how serving students’ mental and emotional health is partly their responsibility and take a more proactive approach to addressing mental health needs among the student body.
It’s fair to call the state of students’ mental health a crisis. According to the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, United States college students reported record-high rates of mental illness during the 2021–2022 academic year, where 44% of surveyed students reported symptoms of depression, 37% reported significant anxiety and 15% reported grappling with serious thoughts of suicide.
What’s driving these skyrocketing rates of mental illness among students? Per a 2022 literature review in Frontiers in Public Health, some risk factors which college students face include high workloads, unfamiliarity in a new environment, difficulty making friends, loneliness, self-isolation and stress about their degree choice and future career.
That’s a lot, but it still only represents a few student-specific stressors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in five adults in the U.S.—including students—struggle with some form of mental illness with risk factors ranging from trauma to chronic illness to social isolation.
This isn’t to say universities should be responsible for providing comprehensive mental healthcare. However, universities have a duty to support students and—at the very least—not worsen the problem.
A limited number of mental health services on campus are provided through PSU’s Center for Student Health & Counseling, which offers counseling services for individuals and groups. However, the more important thing for universities like PSU to focus on is improving their academic response.
For example, take academic workloads—a significant source of stress among students. There’s no university-wide policy at PSU on late work or assignment extensions, and such decisions are left up to the discretion of individual instructors. A student struggling in a course due to mental illness may request extensions or workload accommodations from their professor, and whether or not they succeed is almost entirely up to which professor they happen to get.
I say almost because there is one guaranteed method for getting one’s accommodations respected: the Disability Resource Center (DRC). Students can register with the DRC and request academic accommodations. Once those accommodations are approved, they can submit service requests for each class—accommodations which professors are required to accept.
But there are a few problems with this. First, it ignores students who—for whatever reason—do not have an official diagnosis. Mental illness doesn’t care whether or not someone has a diagnosis, but unfortunately mental healthcare services do. One easy step PSU could take to improve students’ lives is simply respecting their accommodation requests—regardless of official status.
Second, it’s still up to each individual professor to determine how they comply with an accommodation request. Some may be enthusiastic to help, while others might drag their feet and do the bare minimum to comply.
Third—and perhaps most important—students shouldn’t have to disclose their mental health status to the university just to have a chance at relief. Students are human beings, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect for their mental and emotional health. If a student doesn’t have an official diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, it doesn’t make the anxiety and burnout they feel over an extreme workload any less real or distressing.
So what should PSU do instead? There are a few policy changes the university could make right now which would improve the situation, the most impactful of which would be to revamp the accommodation process. If a student needs accommodations for a course, they should be able to get it full stop.
Professors should recognize students as complex human beings facing various life challenges and be ready to support them in achieving success in their courses. Students shouldn’t have to go through a complicated process of getting a diagnosis and filling out an official request to get an academic accommodation.
Long-term, professors should be trained to recognize when students are having trouble in their classes and to assist them if needed. Teachers aren’t therapists, but they are the first line of support for many students. If a student comes to their instructor asking for support, they shouldn’t be completely blindsided.
One part of that is adopting trauma-informed approaches to teaching. Professors are responsible for creating a safe and welcoming environment for their students, which truthfully isn’t very complicated. Instructors just need to show up with a commitment to cultivating safety and empathy in the classroom, respecting the lived experiences of their students and providing a helpful and compassionate ear for students experiencing difficulties.
Practically speaking, professors should work with students to ensure everyone gets a satisfactory education. Students with disabilities, chronic illnesses and mental illness deserve the same educational opportunities as everyone else, and barriers like strict attendance policies and immovable deadlines simply ignore the genuine difficulties these students face. If professors aren’t willing to provide all their students with the same education, then the university should require them to.
The National Education Association (NEA) provides a sample letter for students, faculty and staff to petition their university administration to expand mental health services. The letter includes a list of requests, including “[hiring] culturally competent mental health professionals,” “[providing] culturally competent training to faculty and staff” and “[implementing] policies that create a more inclusive campus environment.”
I encourage any PSU students, faculty and other community members concerned about mental health on campus to write to the university administration—either using the NEA sample letter or your own words. The process may be gradual, but the first step to effecting change is demonstrating to those in power that there’s a problem and that we care enough to do something about it.