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"College Instructors Should Be Prepared for Students' Mental-Health Crises, Experts Say"
By David Glenn
From the Chronicle of Higher Education (12/19/05)
College instructors should prepare themselves in advance to respond to any severe mental-health problems that their students might experience, three scholars said here on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The comments came during an informal symposium on students' psychological problems.
"More people with major mental disorders are attending college," said John C. Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton. Recent improvements in psychotherapy and drug treatment, he said, have allowed some people to attend college who in earlier decades might have been too ill to do so.
He cited a study published this year in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, which surveyed 275 college disability offices. "It's not unusual," Mr. Norcross said, "to have in your class people who are currently suffering from major depressive disorder, alcohol abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and the like."
Mr. Norcross said that instructors should:
- Develop relationships with the psychologists at their institution's counseling center, know what resources are available at their institutions, and know the procedures to use when referring students to those services. "There should be someone at the counseling center who you at least reasonably know, even if it's only from the basketball court," Mr. Norcross said. "You should have someone whom you can call to ask, 'I'm not sure how to deal with this situation, and I'd appreciate your professional opinion.'"
- Consult with their deans and have a thorough knowledge of their institution's policies relating to cases of potential mental illness.
- Know their institution's procedures for complying with the Americans With Disabilities Act. It is often helpful, Mr. Norcross said, for departments to bring in the college's disability officer to refresh the faculty's memory about the ground rules. For reasons of legality and fairness, he said, instructors should be careful to treat all ill students equally. Once a student has a documented mental disorder and has informed the university, that student should receive no fewer -- but also no more -- academic accommodations than a student with a similarly debilitating physical illness.
- Know how to contact the campus police in the rare cases in which a student's behavior becomes threatening or intimidating. He added that it's best to notify an academic administrator before contacting the police.
Much of Mr. Norcross's advice applied to all college instructors, but he also made several points aimed specifically at professors of psychology. Psychology instructors should never be tempted, he said, to act as therapists -- formally or informally -- for their own students. He reminded the audience that the association's rules of ethics forbid psychologists from having multiple relationships with their clients. "As a teacher, you should be empathetic and supportive," Mr. Norcross said, "but always keep the focus on the academic work. Refrain from asking the student any questions about how the treatment is going."
Virginia Andreoli Mathie, the executive director of Psi Chi, an honor society for psychologists in academe, began the symposium by describing two troubled students in a statistics course she once taught at James Madison University. It is often difficult, she said, for instructors to know whether a distressed student is simply having a rocky adolescence, or whether the student is also suffering from a serious disorder. Ms. Mathie said instructors should usually err on the side of caution, and should aggressively -- but tactfully -- encourage such students to take advantage of campus counseling services.
The third panelist, Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, pointed out that certain types of mental disorder typically emerge during late adolescence. Several studies suggest that people in their late teens and early 20s are less likely than older adults to describe themselves as happy, she said.
"The period of young adulthood isn't necessarily a very happy one," she said. "When you're older, you look back at that time and say, Oh, those were the days. But in reality, most people aren't all that happy at this stage."
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