When I was new at college, a story circulated about an incident that had happened two years prior. A student had climbed to the top of the clock tower and threatened to throw himself off. He was then removed from school, and no one ever heard from him again.
The story was told to me in whispers—nothing like this had ever happened here before. And no one seemed to know whether it was because of drugs or perhaps mental illness. My friends and I carried on with our studies, serious about our academics and our futures, but my questions persisted.
How could someone climb the clock tower and threaten to throw himself off? What could have happened to make him do that? Surely there must be other ways of getting out of final exams…
This story has stayed with me for decades, not only because of how rare it was when I was in college, but also because it was so scary. The only other time I had heard of such things was when friends of mine at Cornell University talked about students jumping off the suspension bridge on campus into the gorge below.
Today, that same suspension bridge is caged in with metal netting; you couldn’t jump off it if you wanted to. The safeguarding of this potentially hazardous structure highlights the nationwide shift in students’ mental health in the decades since I was in college. We now talk about teen suicide with regularity, and the The Jed Foundation reports that 33% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 have experienced a mental, behavioral, or emotional health crisis in the past year. The Healthy Minds Study of 2023 reports that 36% of college students have been diagnosed with anxiety and 30% with depression.
For those of us who work with teenagers, there is no question that we have a crisis on our hands. Even the healthiest of students talk about stress and anxiety, about the pressure to perform their best, about their sadness over not being able to get into the colleges they want to despite how hard they have worked. Once in college, students face a new set of challenges: making decisions on their own, managing their own lives, their finances, their study habits, social pressures, and the list goes on. And we haven’t even mentioned social media, substance use, or the influence of AI.
How can we, in our various roles within the field of education, help the teenagers we work with? How can we assure them that there is always another way, that nothing is so dire that they need to self-harm? There is no easy answer, especially when the stakes are high, but we can begin to help by listening. We can stop and take the time to hear what our students are telling us. We can affirm their fears and anxieties, and let them know that what they feel is legitimate. We can assure them that they are not crazy. At times, we can help them by suggesting greater support systems: therapists, school counselors, student support groups geared toward helping students manage their feelings. We were all adolescents once facing uncertainty and we can share our own vulnerabilities with our students when it’s appropriate.
My interest in supporting teenagers and engaging with these difficult questions has led me to pursue training in mental health educational consulting. I was mentored by Myrna Harris and Barbara Posner, two of the best educational consultants in the field, who specifically dealt with students with therapeutic needs. I learned the landscape of mental health treatment and what happens to students whose needs cannot be met by the least restrictive environment. Over the course of my career, I have counseled dozens of students in these situations, and they have gone on to colleges as diverse as American University, University of Oregon, Yale University, Tulane University, Sarah Lawrence College, St. Lawrence University, Reed College, and more. Seeing all my students succeed is deeply gratifying, but with these students in particular, their success is even more thrilling.
I look forward to sharing more from my professional experience counseling students with mental health needs towards their ideal fit college. This article is the first of a series about what we, as professionals, need to know about our students as they make their way to young adulthood: what we can do to help and what we need to do when our help isn’t enough.