The Healthy Minds report reveals the state of mental health on college campuses, including that more than 80% have suffered academically since the pandemic began.
By: Chris Burt | March 1, 2021
'Make it til May.'
Dr. Sarah Lipson, assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, noted the potential double meaning in those signs that have popped up on bustling Commonwealth Avenue near campus.
Meant to highlight the struggle to maintain its residential setup through the end of the spring semester, the placards easily could be interpreted another way, she says: 'How do we look out for another as much as possible? How do we bring compassion and kindness? We might be crawling to the finish line in May.'
Lipson’s reference is noteworthy. As Associate Director of the Healthy Minds Network based out of BU and the University of Michigan, she is also heavily involved in the annual Healthy Minds Study that assesses the state of mental health at college campuses across America.
2020 was an unforgiving year, punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 33,000 students at 36 institutions that took part in the most recent web-based survey during the fall of 2020, 60% said they needed help during the past 12 months for emotional or mental health distress. Another 83% said those issues affected academic performances at least one day during the previous month, and more than a quarter said they experienced it for six or more days.
The results were 'quite jarring', even for Lipson, who has studied mental health in adolescent populations extensively.
'Every semester for the past about three years has been the highest prevalence that we’ve ever seen,' she says of the annual survey. 'We’ve seen that trend over the past 10 years and the past three years even more so. In the fall of 2020, we had close to half of students who screened positively for clinically significant symptoms of major depression or anxiety. As someone who works closely in the data and monitors this trend semester by semester, it did not shock me, but it is kind of the motivation and the urgency behind everything that I do.'
The significance of the study
Lipson, who worked closely on the study with Daniel Eisenberg, a former University of Michigan professor now at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, notes that '75% of lifetime mental illnesses will onset by age 24 … and about half of each birth cohort is enrolling in U.S. postsecondary education.'"