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PrintHow many times have you stepped on a smudged flier offering counseling and support services in a bathroom stall or a neglected corner of a hallway? They are easy to ignore—the succinct phrases are so often repeated that they have become clichés.
Fatigue. Stress. Frustration. Most students have conditioned themselves to ignore these problems rather than confront them. It is easier to drink up or take a quick hit than to actually ask yourself whether something might be wrong. This cycle of pain and suppression has recently been brought to scientific light in a study conducted by Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia.
Olfson ran the first large-scale, evidence-based study to draw on multiple disciplines and include diagnostic information on personality disorders. The information was gathered from 44,000 interviews that were conducted with people of the ages 19 to 25. Interviewees were asked to recall their behavior over the previous year based on symptoms listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which doctors use to diagnose mental heath disorders. According to this manual, a personality disorder is essentially “a long-standing and maladaptive pattern of perceiving and responding to other people and to stressful circumstances.” The study’s findings are simultaneously shocking and expected.
According to the numbers, almost half of those questioned had a psychiatric disease over a one-year span. Additionally, approximately one in five students have, at some point, failed to fulfill an obligation, had a legal problem, done something dangerous, or caused social problems by misusing alcohol. “We found that some disorders, such as alcohol use disorders, were more common in college than non-college attending young people, while the reverse was true of bipolar disorder and drug use disorders,” said Olfson.
The causes of this are yet to be determined. The study did find, however, that the alcohol and drug abuse category had the lowest rates of people seeking help. Considering that so many of us are taking part in this activity in college, is it any wonder that students ignore their troubles and call them habits rather than addictions? It is easy to brush off a problem that appears to be so prevalent in our environment.
The United States is not alone when it comes to widespread drinking among college students. Though Americans have been fascinated for years with the “French Paradox,” that of a nation with a reputation for drinking yet not suffering its downsides, numerous recent studies show it to be false. French men, for example, have the highest rate of liver disease compared to men of other nationalities. In fact, the problem with drinking in France, especially with youths, appeared so dangerous in the ’90s that the “Loi Evin” was established. This law prohibits alcohol advertisements on television and alcohol sponsorship of sporting events. Dr. Michel Craplet, a psychiatrist who represents France at Eurocare, speculates that the reason for such pervasive consumption is that, “it’s in the head, in the culture. We don’t need the alcohol lobby here because we view wine passionately.” In France, it seems, the environment has a huge effect on the predominance of the drinking culture, just as it does at American schools.
Because this was the first large-scale study of its kind, it is hard to say whether the amount of students affected has been growing over the years. The main reason so many of these disorders surface during college is that their diagnosis is rare during earlier years. “The way personalities are defined—the fact that they have to be pervasive, persistent, and not limited to one development stage—makes the diagnosis of personality disorder in clinical practice relatively uncommon in childhood or adolescence,” said Olfson.
Whether this is a recent growth or not, a major problem furthers it—the lack of treatment taking place. According to Olfson, “much more needs to be done to make mental health and substance abuse treatment accessible to young people.” He suggests extending access to self-help groups, college counseling centers, and mental health professionals within student health centers. “Such efforts might take the form of voluntary and confidential mental health screening, college wide efforts to de-stigmatize mental health care, and greater availability of the services themselves,” said Olfson.
Columbia offers Counseling and Psychological Services, Alice’s advice, and various student-run support groups to those in need. All of these are admittedly helpful, but only to a certain extent. The counseling sessions offered are limited by time, fees, and insurance policies. Support groups can provide a helpful space for sharing and understanding, but when serious medical attention is needed, there may not be much they can do. Olfson’s study, as it stands, can’t yet solve these issues. It can, however, be taken objectively and act as a warning, even just a reminder, that the extremes we sometimes go to for relief can often lead to long-term consequences.
5 March 2009
vol. 6, issue 6
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