Becca Frazee’s grades climb and crash with the mood swings of her bipolar disorder.
When the Colorado State University student is depressed, she can hardly drag herself out of bed, let alone find the energy to study. And when she’s in mania, a hypersensitive, agitated state, she is spirited and creative, but her heart races, her head pounds and her thoughts rush so fast that the words rolling out of her mouth sometimes don’t make sense.
Frazee, 21, is one of an increasing number of American college students dealing with mental illness, creating building pressure on colleges to expand campus counseling centers and examine their responsibility for students’ mental health.
Almost 95 percent of college counseling centers report an increase in the past few years in the number of students who have already taken psychiatric medication when they arrive at college. And experts say the college years, ages 18 to 22, are a common time for those with a mental illness to experience their first bout with depression or first schizophrenic break.
Colleges across the country also are reporting an increase in the intensity of mental problems, including depression, stress and self-injury. In fact, the number of college counseling center clients on psychiatric medication rose from 9 percent in 1994 to 25 percent in 2005, a University of Pittsburgh study said.
Nationwide, 9 percent of college students sought on-campus counseling last year, the study says. Colleges in Colorado report a similar use of mental health services – and increases in usage and intensity that reflect national trends.
At CSU, the counseling center had a 15 percent increase in clinical sessions last school year compared with the prior year, director Charles Davidshofer said. The center saw 2,281 students for almost 14,000 clinical sessions.
At Regis University in Denver, campus counselors typically used to send two or three students a year to see the school’s consulting psychiatrist, who can prescribe medication. That number has jumped to 30 or 35 in recent years, said Jerene Anderson, director of personal counseling services.
“It’s a stressful world,” she said. “There is a constant bombardment of stimulation. Computers. Music. E-mail. I think that affects a person’s neurochemistry at some point.”
Experts say reasons for the increased severity of mental illness are mounting academic and parental pressure and the rising financial burden of attending college. Those pressures are hitting students the same time as roommate and relationship problems, and as they figure out what to do with their lives.
Also, better treatment is allowing students who might not have made it through high school in the past to succeed in college.
Frazee, who tried to end her life at 15 with 40 pills and a bottle of vodka, barely graduated from high school. She pulled her grades up her senior year thanks to medication that stabilizes her moods. But she fell into depression her first semester at CSU and later learned the shorter fall days sink her mood.
“Every fall I have a C average, and every spring I have an A average,” said Frazee, who is chapter president of a student mental health awareness group called Active Minds.
The national organization, started by a recent college graduate whose brother killed himself, has 43 campus chapters. Regis University is setting up the second one in Colorado.
Students in Active Minds try to reduce the stigma of mental illness and educate their peers about warning signs, said national founder Alison Malmon, 24. She’s organizing a “stress-out,” asking college students across the country to scream at 9 p.m. April 19.
CSU’s Active Minds chapter has about 15 members and more than 100 students on its e-mail list, said Kathy McKinney, a graduate student who founded the group last fall. The club has set up two support groups and panel discussions, and shown movies about depression and eating disorders.
“It brings in people who are questioning mental illness, either in themselves or someone they care about,” she said.
Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications on college campuses, and suicide is the second-leading cause of death for college students, following accidents.
Harvard, which had a string of highly publicized student suicides, is a leader in mental health support. The university increased its counseling center staff by about 25 percent a few years ago and has nine full-time prescribing nurses and psychiatrists – nine more than many schools have, said Richard Kadison, Harvard’s chief of mental health services and author of “College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It.”
Most universities are discussing how to get more funding to ramp up mental health services, but some are “taking the stick- your-head-in-the-sand approach: ‘If we don’t have services, they can’t sue us,”‘ he said.
College administrators are awaiting the outcomes of two high-profile lawsuits that will define their responsibility to students with mental illnesses.
One is a $27 million lawsuit filed by the parents of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who set herself on fire in her dorm. They blame university counselors for not doing enough to help her.
And a former George Washington University student is suing the school because he says he was sent home when he sought help for suicidal thoughts.
The Jed Foundation, started by the parents of a University of Arizona student who killed himself, brought a task force to MIT after Elizabeth Shin’s suicide and also advised Harvard and New York University.
“If there is a problem on their campus, then it becomes a huge focus – they have all the news trucks and everything, and they don’t want that,” founder Donna Satow said. “It’s usually lower on the totem pole of the things a school wants to focus on. But there is a growing awareness in this country that this is something that needs to be addressed.”
At the University of Colorado at Boulder counseling center, director Richard Rodriguez wants two more counselors to deal with the increase in students and the intensity of their problems.
Regis’ counseling center, which typically sees 12 percent to 14 percent of students, offers unlimited visits, unlike many universities that limit free visits to five or so per semester. Typically, there’s an influx of students in the center during the first six weeks of fall semester. That’s because some freshmen who were diagnosed with a mental illness in high school “want a fresh start” and go off their medication, said Sally Spencer- Thomas, director of leadership development and behavioral health promotion at Regis.
“Mostly, it’s depression,” she said. “They feel so overwhelmed, they just can’t get to class, they can’t concentrate, they can’t get out of bed.”
Tracy Ryan, a CSU graduate student who was diagnosed with depression and obsessive- compulsive disorder at 12, dropped out of veterinary science school last year because of depression.
“It was so devastating to me,” she said. “If you are severely depressed, you just lack the stamina to study. Then your grades go down and you get more depressed. It’s a downward spiral.”
A year later and on medication, the 28-year-old has a 4.0 grade-point average so far in her agriculture master’s program. She talks openly about her mental illness.
“Just like someone with diabetes whose pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin, my brain doesn’t produce serotonin in the quantities that are needed, so therefore I have these issues,” she said. “It’s not something to be ashamed of, and I want other people to know that.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
