Reframing the Conversation on College Student Mental Health

Abstract

The expression “mental health” has become ubiquitous when discussing college students’ lived experiences. While effective, this expression has not, problematically, been deconstructed. In this article, we explore what “mental health” means. Through doing so we identify three unintended effects embedded within its usage: (a) symptoms should be relieved and not understood as meaningful; (b) health refers to objective functioning alone; and (c) expert authority should be emphasized at the cost of local communities. Accordingly, we argue for the importance of resisting the unreflective usage of this term and creating spaces to reframe the conversations, which engages complexity, subjective meaning, and ambiguity.

KEYWORDS:

• college counseling
• complexity
• deconstruction
• mental health

Notes

1. The increased usage of counseling services and reports by directors that they are seeing more students, who are also sicker, may not reflect an underlying rise in prevalence of these students, but instead more students using services and greater awareness of problematic issues (Hunt & Eisenberg, 2010).

2. It is worth noting that the language of medical discourse when applied to psychological illness has been successfully used to create “parity.” Similarly, psychologists may reason with administrators by comparing psychological illness to medical illness, suggesting, for instance, that this student would not be treated like this if they had a broken bone. While this has undoubtedly been beneficial as a tactic, it obscures the subtle fact that psychological illnesses themselves are only seen as meaningful when compared to their bigger medical brothers.