ABSTRACT
Responding to the call for papers on “The Future of College Student Mental Health,” we analyze the current “crisis” in college student mental health, and we discuss how it is co-constructed by our students and we who are the faculty and the administrators. We identify three factors: 1) A shift from offering value-based education, toward promoting transformative experience, 2) ambivalence around recognizing systematic and structural factors contributing to suffering, and 3) anxiety about the use of “authority.” We consider in detail our understanding of these factors as well as how our existential-relational model of development can help make sense of the complex phenomena facing our students and our field to make suggestions for how counseling centers can respond to student needs in the future.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. We’re grateful to Edgar Levenson’s asking of this question throughout his writing in interpersonal psychoanalysis as a framing for this title and this article.
2. Our model draws primarily from British object relations, especially the work of Klein (Citation1975a, Citation1975b), Winnicott (Citation1971) and Thomas Ogden (Citation1986) but further incorporates contemporary attachment theory (Beebe & Lachmann, Citation2014; Beebe, Lachmann, Markese, & Bahrick, Citation2012a, Citation2012b), existential philosophy (Sartre & Barnes, Citation1966) and important relational considerations (Mitchell, Citation1988; Stern, Citation2015; Sullivan, Citation1953).
Beebe, B., Lachmann, F., Markese, S., & Bahrick, L. (2012a). On the origins of disorganized attachment and internal working models: Paper I. A dyadic systems approach. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22(2), 253–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2012.666147 Beebe, B., Lachmann, F., Markese, S., Buck, K. A., Bahrick, L. E., Chen, H., Cohen, P., Andrews, H., Feldstein, S., & Jaffe, J. (2012b). On the origins of disorganized attachment and internal working models: Paper II. An empirical microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant interaction. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22(3), 352–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2012.679606 Sartre, J.-P. (1966). Being and nothingness, a phenomenological essay on ontology (H.E. Barnes Trans.). Washington Square Press. ( Originally published 1943) Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. Harvard University Press. Stern, D. B. (2015). Relational freedom: Emergent properties of the interpersonal fields (Psychoanalysis in a new key book series). Routledge Publications. Sullivan, H. S. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. W.W. Norton Publications.
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