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Yesterday USA Today’s Marilyn Elias wrote an interesting piece about the status of college campuses today with regard to mental illness awareness this first anniversary of the Virginia Tech tragedy.
Here are some interesting points of her article:
1. About 20 percent of colleges had assessment teams before the Virginia Tech murders, says Keith Anderson, a veteran counselor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Now he doesn’t know of any college that hasn’t either created a team or strengthened the one they had.
2. Although troubled students rarely attack classmates, suicide is a far more common problem. The percentage of students with mental disorders is increasing, and their conditions are getting more serious, experts agree.
3. The percentage of students diagnosed with depression was 15 percent in 2007, up from 10 percent in 2000, according to surveys by the American College Health Association.
4. Approximately 23 percent of students coming to the campus counseling centers are on psychiatric medicine, up from 9 percent in 1994.
5. According to 66 percent of college counseling center directors, many schools are training professors and staff members to look for troublesome signs, and more professors are consulting with counseling centers students of concern since the Virginia Tech massacre.
6. According to a 2007 American College Health Association survey of 71,860 students at 107 colleges, 38 percent of the students said they had been severely depressed (enough that they could not function) between 1 and 10 times, 7 percent said they had been severely depressed 7 or more times, and 55 percent had never been depressed.
7. According to the same survey, 35 percent of students diagnosed with depression were taking medication and 25 percent of them were in therapy.
To read the USA Today story, click here.