Tag: college students

Florida College Allegedly Flagged Applicants Who Mentioned Mental Health Struggles

A Florida liberal arts college is under investigation over allegations of “weeding out” applicants with a mental health history.

A Florida college allegedly discriminated against applicants who may have mental health issues, according to a complaint filed by two former students.

The admissions department of the New College of Florida (NCF) adopted a new policy in 2017 that “instituted a ‘red flag’ system for application review,” the complaint alleges. Under the instruction of Dr. Joy Hamm, the new Dean of Admissions at the time who implemented the policy, applications containing “any unusual or concerning details” were flagged for a second review.

“[Dr. Hamm] actively instructed people to red-flag essays where students disclosed mental health issues and disabilities. We believe this may be a violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act],” reads the complaint, which is available online.

The students who filed the complaint, Maria Simmerling and Eugenia Quintanilla of the class of 2018, worked in the admissions department from 2015-2018. They say they were made aware of the practice through fellow staff who “feared retaliation if they spoke up.”

The document goes on in more disturbing detail: “Dr. Hamm explicitly stated that she was trying to ‘weed out’ people with disabilities and mental health problems in our prospective student pool.”

There were allegedly “multiple cases” of students who qualified for automatic admission but were rejected “after their essays were red-flagged for merely mentioning mental health struggles,” reads the complaint.

After failing to get a serious response from the school, the NCF alumni decided to go public with the allegations. “People should not have to go through a second review process if they disclose mental health or disabilities in their application essays,” they stated.

The school’s chief compliance officer Barbara Stier confirmed the use of red-flagging to Inside Higher Ed. However, she says that the practice was not designed to discriminate but to mark applicants who also have low test scores or lack certain academic requirements to indicate that they did not meet the criteria for admission.

NCF President Donal O’Shea released a statement last Friday acknowledging the complaint. “New College very much values cognitive diversity,” he said. “The allegations in the complaints are absolutely antithetical to our values.”

According to his statement, there will be a second, external investigation in May.

Simmerling and Quintanilla say that the school’s internal investigation—which found no wrongdoing—was a “joke” and was treated as a mere “formality.”

Even as they reached out to administration officials including O’Shea, members of HR and the provost, the students say their complaint was not taken seriously. “They all denied any wrongdoing, often with contradictory stories,” according to the complaint.

View the original article at thefix.com

30 April 2019
How Student Abuse of ADHD Meds Affects Peers With a Diagnosis

A UNC survey found that a majority of students have misused Adderall or other prescription stimulants. This is hurting their peers who have a real need for the medications.

Various research in recent years has pointed to a growing problem on college campuses: the misuse of stimulants such as Adderall to aid in academic success.

And the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is no exception, the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel reports.

According to the student paper, a recent survey of 145 students on campus found that more than one-third had used Adderall or other prescription stimulants in the past month. Of those students, 60.7% admitted they had used such medications without a prescription.

UNC psychology professor Beth Kurtz-Costes tells the Daily Tar Heel that one reason for use of such medications may be that students feel pressure to keep up and perform well academically in college.

“An amount of anxiety that is serious enough that it requires someone to go to CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) or to seek outside help will definitely hamper performance,” Kurtz-Costes said. “A moderate amount of anxiety is considered good. You’ll perform better on an exam or in giving a speech if you’re moderately aroused or anxious, but going beyond a certain point, certainly, is a deterrent to performance.”

For some students, such as UNC sophomore Paige Masten, stimulants like Adderall are necessary. Masten tells the Daily Tar Heel that she has been diagnosed with ADHD, and as such, the medication affects her differently than it may for her peers without such diagnoses.

“When I take my Adderall, I don’t have the same effects,” she said. “I don’t feel super productive and I don’t feel like I’m going to stay up all night the same way they do. I just feel kind of normal and able to function, whereas without it I can’t focus whatsoever.”

For people with diagnoses like ADHD, medications like Adderall aid in lowering stimulation levels and returning them to a normal level of function, the Texas A&M University Health Science Center reports. But for those without, it can be dangerous and can even result in stroke or death.

“People who take it for exams or just when they’re stressed, it kind of can mess with their brain because they’ll stay up way longer than they need to, they’ll be really jittery and hyper-attentive,” Masten added. “I think, ultimately, it does the opposite of what it’s supposed to be doing for them, whereas for me it makes me into a more normal person.”

For Masten, seeing other students abuse the medication is frustrating, as access to it is already limited.

“Obviously I have the luxury and the privilege of being able to go to the doctor when I need to and being able to afford it,” Masten said. “But there’s also some people who struggle with ADHD who may not have that same luxury, and making it even harder would make it even more difficult for them to obtain the drugs they need to be as productive as people without ADHD. I think that that further disadvantages them in a way that would be really unfair.”

View the original article at thefix.com

30 April 2019
How Much Do College Students Know About Heavy Drinking & Blackouts?

A new study revealed that a lot of students are unaware of the consequences of risky drinking.

With some statistics showing that nearly half of all college students who drink alcohol regularly also experience a memory blackout, researchers have launched a series of studies to determine exactly what this demographic understands about alcohol and blackouts, as well as the toll that it takes on their health.

Their research underscored that while students are aware that hard drinking can lead to blackouts, they were unclear about how to avoid them. They were also unclear about the difference between a full blackout and a “brownout” (a shorter period of fuzzy memory).

The researchers hoped to use the information gleaned from their studies to provide more detailed information to students about the risks of high-volume drinking.

The research, published in the October 2018 edition of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, was drawn from single-gender focus groups comprised of 50 students (28 women and 22 men) from four-year colleges and universities in the Providence, Rhode Island area.

The researchers analyzed the data and composed three reports, the first of which looked at students’ understanding of the cause of blackouts.

As Science Daily noted, the students were aware that drinking large quantities of liquor or drinking very quickly could produce a blackout; however, they were less aware of other factors—including mixing drugs with alcohol, gender and genetics—which could be contributing factors.

The second study looked at how students viewed the experience of blackouts. The results showed a mixed reaction, with many reporting them as “scary” or “embarrassing,” with others describing them as “exciting.”

External factors, such as friends’ perceptions of blackouts, who they were with at the time of the blackout, and what happened during the blackout, were also determining factors in how the experience was recalled.

The third report sought to determine if the students understood the exact nature of a blackout. Most respondents described a blackout experience as a period of heavy drinking, though a blackout is defined as a period of complete memory loss lasting one hour or more. Shorter periods of memory loss were described as “brownouts.”

Forty-nine percent of college students surveyed reported experiencing both blackouts and brownouts in the past month, while 32% only had brownouts and just 5% reported only blackouts.

Respondents also claimed that brownouts were less troubling than full blackouts, which study co-author Kate Carey from the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown’s School of Public Health noted as “discounting the earlier signs of memory loss, suggesting that they weren’t serving as red flags or even yellow flags.”

Carey and her fellow researchers hope to use the information culled from the study to create education modules for alcohol prevention programs that target high-volume, high-speed drinking or other behaviors that could lead to blackouts.

These behaviors include “pre-gaming”—in which alcohol is consumed prior to an event where more alcohol will be available—drinking games or “chugging” were all cited as behaviors that could lead to blackouts.

Reframing how students view these experiences as outside the norm could also serve as helpful prevention, Carey noted.

View the original article at thefix.com

7 November 2018
Demand For Mental Health Resources Not Being Met On College Campuses

One mental health professional estimates that almost half of colleges students who need services are not receiving them.

College is a stressful transition for many—that’s apparent from recent mental health numbers.

According to Deseret News, greater numbers of college students are facing mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety, and as such, the number of students seeking help on campuses has increased.

Ben Locke, executive director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University, tells Deseret News that the demand for mental health services is growing rapidly—about five to six times faster than enrollment. He says that since enrollment numbers help fund such services, it’s difficult for some colleges to fulfill the demand.

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health has found that of the students seeking help, 70% have anxiety. Of those, 25% consider anxiety their main concern. These numbers, according to Deseret News, are based on 2017 data covering 160,014 students at 160 colleges.

Additionally, a 2017 American College Health Association Survey of 63,000 students discovered that 2 in 5 students would say they are so depressed that they “struggled to function,” and 3 in 5 had felt “overwhelming anxiety” in the previous year.

According to experts, college students may be particularly prone to such mental health struggles because of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

And it isn’t just the volume of students that’s an issue. According to Daniel Eisenberg, professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan and director of the Healthy Minds Network, students’ symptoms are growing more severe.

According to Eisenberg’s data, almost half of students who need services are not receiving them.

Randy P. Auerbach of Columbia University and lead author of a study about mental health in college students worldwide, says the problem needs to be addressed.

“We are seeing debilitating levels of anxiety that are more and more common—where, by the time they get to college, students are so worried about different aspects of their lives it can be a real problem. Students struggling with very severe symptoms who don’t get treatment are likely to have consequences.”

On some campuses, students are taking the matter into their own hands. At the University of Michigan, student body president Bobby Dishell and some of his peers had begun a program called the Wolverine Support Network. The idea was that students could form small groups and offer one another support.

Sam Orley, whose brother George took his own life when he was a student at the university, served as the executive director of the program. Orley said that rather than being a program for mental illness, the Wolverine Support Network is a “holistic mental health and well-being effort.”

In some cases, the struggles college students are facing may be downplayed, according to Kelly Davis, director of peer advocacy, supports and services for Mental Health America.

“There’s a lot of condescension—dismissal of how hard that period of life is,” Davis told Deseret News.

Last spring, Deseret News sat down with students to discuss their fears and worries. Topping the list were fear of missing out, fear of failure and job competition.

“The bar is just so high for everything,” one student said in conclusion.

View the original article at thefix.com

11 October 2018