Survey finds record low mental-health outlook among college freshmen

A national survey has confirmed what college counselors in the Philadelphia region have already noted on their own campuses with dismay: Students are rating their emotional health at all-time lows.

Only 51.9 percent of respondents judged their emotional health above average, according to a survey of 201,000 freshmen at 279 colleges and universities conducted in the fall by the University of California at Los Angeles.

That was the smallest percentage since researchers began asking the question in 1985. From 2009 to 2010, the share of freshmen reporting above-average emotional health dropped 3.4 percentage points.

At several colleges in the Philadelphia area, administrators say that the demand for mental-health services has been growing for some time, but that there was a noticeable uptick this academic year. Many have responded by increasing counseling staffs, among other measures.

At St. Joseph's University, Greg Nicholls, director of counseling and psychological services, said that not only were more students seeking counseling, but their mental-health issues were more severe, with diagnoses of bipolar and anxiety disorders among the most common.

"We're increasingly taxed," he said. "That's true of all our neighboring schools."

At Swarthmore College, there was a 20 percent rise in the number of students seeking help in the fall, said David Ramirez, director of psychological services there. He cautioned, however, that it was difficult to know what caused the increase.

"You don't know if it's a cultural shift, if people are less embarrassed [to seek services]," Ramirez said. "Before, there was a stigma, and now it's just a smart thing to do."

The University of Delaware noted a 27 percent increase in requests for counseling in the fall. Students complained of "more distress and difficulty in negotiating their academic, social, and interpersonal lives," said Charles Beale, director of the university's Center for Counseling and Student Development.

In the UCLA survey, freshmen at colleges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey scored in the middle of the pack on their ratings of their emotional health, according to Linda DeAngelo, assistant director of research. In New England, only 47.4 percent of respondents considered their mental health above average, compared with 56.1 percent in the Plains states.

Nearly 12 percent of freshmen who responded reported a disability or medical condition, the most common being attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The surveyed students also had "extremely high expectations for themselves," DeAngelo said, "and for what they want to accomplish in college."

Indeed, when it came to academic ability and the drive to achieve, they rated themselves higher than their predecessors.

Those traits are generally considered positives, DeAngelo said, but they may have become so exaggerated that they are taking a toll on students' emotional well-being.

The economy also comes into the play.

"Students probably know that their families are sacrificing a lot right now to send them to college," she said, adding that many were also worried about how they would pay for college.

Students are under "so much pressure . . . to be the standard, to be a success for your family," said Anthony Fluellen, a Lincoln University senior and certified peer educator. "There's so much pressure on you."

Sister Peggy Egan, a dean at Neumann University, said students today seemed to have fewer skills for dealing with the bumps in life.

"They don't necessarily understand their own emotions," she said. "They don't know how to handle conflict in a positive way. . . . They're not as resilient as we would like."