Access to Achievement
Off to College Alone: Students with Mental Illness
The transition from high school to college, from adolescence to legal adulthood, can be tricky for any teenager, but for the increasing number of young people who arrive on campus with diagnoses of serious mental disorders — and for their parents — the passage can be particularly fraught. Standard struggles with class schedules, roommates, and social freedom are complicated by decisions about if or when to use campus counseling services, whether or not to take medication and whether to disclose an illness to friends or professors.
Keeping a psychiatric disability under control in an environment often fueled by all-night cram sessions, junk food and heavy drinking is a challenge for even the most motivated students. In addition, the normal separation that goes along with college requires new roles and boundaries with parents, the people who best know the history and contours of their illness.
Young adults approach the move to a new life differently, some with defiant independence, some with avoidance. Each approach, say psychiatrists, counselors, dormitory assistants and other campus leaders, comes with its own risk. The students who are most dependent on their parents may be dangerously unprepared for the inevitable stresses of college life. On the other hand, students who are adamant about doing everything on their own may be afraid to reach out for help when they stumble.
For parents, the anxious pride at seeing children go off to college is often tinged with fear that their child might fall apart, spiraling into depression or becoming suicidal. Are they going to therapy as they promised? Are they taking the right dose of medication at the right time? Should they as parents inform the school that their child has an illness? Is a fight with a roommate part of a normal transition to college life or a sign of impending trouble? Does an emotional e-mail message written at 3 a.m. represent a transitory moment of turmoil or a reason to get on an airplane?
Once teenagers legally become adults, which in most states happens at age 18, they, not their parents, assume control over decisions about therapy and medication. If trouble arises, parents may or may not hear about it because college counselors are bound by confidentiality when dealing with adult students.
Separation
In a 2005 national survey of the directors of college counseling centers, 95 percent of counseling directors reported an increase in students who were already on psychiatric medications when they came in for help. While universities grapple with how to serve the growing number of students with mental disorders, students are taking the initiative by helping one another. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has 30 campus affiliates, with 18 more in formation, groups that are set up as student clubs and are financed by school activity budgets and fund-raisers. Programs like the Jed Foundation, a suicide prevention program, and National Depression Screening Day, held each October, offer additional resources.
While the overall message from the groups and programs focuses on the potential for success, students who have been through the transition of leaving home for college say it is also important to be honest about the challenges.
Dr. Richard Kadison, chief of mental health services at Harvard, said there were things students with mental illness could do before starting college to increase the chances of a manageable transition. Most important, he said, is establishing local health support on or near campus. Maintaining a relationship with a counselor from home can be helpful, but “you don’t want to end up in an emergency talking to someone at school that you have never laid eyes on,” Dr. Kadison said.
Source: Lynette Clemetson, The New York Times, Published: December 8, 2006
Learning Disabilities: Back to School
Disability Now Visible On Campus
Days after enrolling as a college freshman, David Carson had to admit to a stranger that he couldn’t spell the name of the school he was attending.
An employee watching him struggle to write out a check couldn’t believe he needed her help to spell “Indiana,” “University” and “Pennsylvania.”
“Just write IUP!” she snapped, flashing a look so cutting he remembers it to this day.
“I felt very small,” says Carson, who took to carrying a prepared list of the spellings he’d need to survive each day. “I thought I was dumb.”
Turns out he had a learning disability affecting his spelling, one that drove him from IUP and two other schools but one he overcame in time to graduate from La Roche College in 1992 with a near-perfect grade average of 3.91. Now a college recruiter who speaks to those with similar disabilities, Carson is watching as this latest group of once-excluded students becomes increasingly visible on America’s college campuses.
He knows their growing ranks mean more will ultimately succeed. But he also knows many will struggle with self-doubt and embarrassment as he once did, or simply give up.
About one in 25 college students is learning disabled, up sharply from the 1980s, as more students who have been diagnosed with such disorders set their sights beyond high school, according to a June report by the Washington, D.C. – based Institute for Higher Education Policy. The most common among this group of disabilities is dyslexia, a difficulty acquiring and using language that often translates into poor spelling, writing or reading.
Nationwide, students with learning disabilities are the fastest-growing segment of all disabled students in college and are part of what some say is the newest wave of campus diversity. Just as laws brought more working-class students, racial minorities and women onto campuses, disabled students are gaining access they were once denied.
But unlike other disabilities, those that involve learning are “invisible,” experts say. Some argue that, once on campus, the biggest obstacle these students face is skepticism as to whether they are using special classroom accommodations as a crutch or, worse, want to game the system.
Judging by sheer volume of programs, colleges and universities are doing more than ever to accommodate – and in some cases actively recruit – these students. A 500-page guidebook published by Thomson-Peterson’s profiles 1,100 campuses that offer help, ranging from tutors to special software to substituting a class most at odds with a disability.
But others argue that even as these programs proliferate, the quality of help varies widely. And what limited information exists on the subject indicates these students are significantly more likely to drop out--Forty-six percent of them did compared with 33 percent of students without a disability, according to one study by the U.S. Department of Education.
Experts say that student with learning disabilities tend to go from college to college and almost always go to more than one school because they are not successful.
Under law, certain classroom accommodations are available, including extra time to take tests, books on tape and help with note-taking, but only if a student with a documented disability identifies himself as such and seeks help.
Many do so and benefit from it. Sometimes, however, the real problem is a student’s own reluctance to seek help, say campus administrators. Intent on escaping labels placed on them in high school, some will shun the very assistance that can be the difference between thriving and flunking out.
“It’s not unusual for me to talk to a freshman who says, ‘I don’t want the accommodation. I want to do it on my own. I want to be like everyone else.” said Larry Powell, who works with learning disabled students at Carnegie Mellon University.
Knowing they are flirting with disaster, especially on a campus with such a punishing workload, Powell gives the same advice over and over. “It’s best to arm yourself,” he tells them. “Take the accommodation.”
Source: By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. To read more, go to: 'Invisible' disability now visible on campus (www.post-gazette.com/pg/04249/373149.stm)
