http://chronicle.com/article/An-Epidemic-of-Anguish/232721/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Disability professionals at my own institution report an ever-increasing number of student-clients coming through their doors every year. These include the physically disabled --- blind, hearing impaired, and wheel-chair bound students. But the vast majority are students with documented learning and mental disabilities.
Why? I can hypothesize four reasons:
1. Better diagnostic techniques and more sophisticated recognition of learning disabilities.
2. Better medications that enable the chronically depressed, bipolar and schizoid youngsters to manage their disabilities and cope with there effects.
3. A recognition by some parents and children of the advantages available if you can find a professional prepared to diagnose a learning disorder.
4. Thanks to laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act, there is far greater acceptance of students with disabilities on our campuses, embraced by some institutions, reluctantly accepted by others.
Let's assume that point (3) above represents only a small minority of all documented disabilities. Why, then, do these problems appear to be proliferating? I have been listening to an audio version of "The Bully Pulpit" by Doris Kearns Goodwin, as I make my daily two hour commute back and forth to my university. Goodwin notes that at the turn of the last century, urbanization, transportation and communication advances resulted in an unanticipated spike in nervous disorders. How much more so must today's IT advances be affecting our nervous systems?
My parents told me whan I was a youngster that "when you get older, time will pass faster." I distinctly recall that happening when I was about 35 and leaving my first stint in the academy for a decade of private practice of the law.
Today, my own children, their friends, and the students I encounter all confirm that for them this acceleration of time occurred a good two decades earlier than the phenomenon happened to me. How stressful! Could it be that this has something to do with the rise in mental afflictions, such as depression?
Here is one opinion I found on the internet:
"On the micro level, young people feel pressure about life, pressure to conform, fit in, succeed and achieve, while trying to balance a strong internal drive to be and experience themselves. Young people are opening up, feeling more than ever; they are sensitive, intuitive and display great wisdom and knowingness.
"It is this conflict, the outer world of mass consciousness versus the inner experience and need to flow, that is leading to the dramatic increases in young people experiencing anxiety, depression, stress and other medically unexplained symptoms."
Another source suggests that stress is caused by too much standardized testing, too much homework, too much emphasis on getting into a good college.
Whatever the cause(s), the evidence is that depression doubled from 1995 to 2001, and has continued to rise in the following 14 years.
And, because the Department of Labor has decided that the law is violated when a university sends a suicidal student home, rather than dealing with the problem on campus, the challenge for academics extends beyond the day to day pressure created by this burgeoning population to the life-and-death challenges that such students present at the sharp edge of the problem.
When we fail to handle the problem in house, here's what can happen:
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