--- title: Back to School: College Is a Risky Time for Mental Health description: The National Alliance on Mental Illness released a guidebook for students and parents that outlines warning signs for mental illness. canonical: https://time.com/4473575/college-mental-health-guidebook/ author: Maya Rhodan article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-08-31T16:09:12.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T03:16:31.000Z article:section: Health og:title: Why College Is a Risky Time for Students' Mental Health og:description: A new guidebook can help. og:url: https://time.com/4473575/college-mental-health-guidebook/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd5307032d9c1e18d/69888b998e06014574465150/160318_poll_collegeadvice.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2100 og:image:height: 1181 og:image:alt: 160318_POLL_CollegeAdvice og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why College Is a Risky Time for Students' Mental Health twitter:description: A new guidebook can help. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd5307032d9c1e18d/69888b998e06014574465150/160318_poll_collegeadvice.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why College Is a Risky Time for Students' Mental Health > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. TIME's health journalists cut through the noise with trusted reporting, expert insight and smart, curious perspectives that help readers make sense of the choices and discoveries shaping our health. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League [Watch (HLS stream): My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o8izpqKu.m3u8) (6:50)  _Published 2014-05-14. In April, 23 Columbia and Barnard students filed a federal Title IX complaint alleging that the University mishandled sexual assault cases_ by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Updated: Dec 13, 2023 3:16 AM UTCPublished: Aug 31, 2016 4:09 PM UTC  Getty Images by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Updated: Dec 13, 2023 3:16 AM UTCPublished: Aug 31, 2016 4:09 PM UTC **Correction appended, Aug. 31, 2016** Dana hadn’t had any prior experiences with mental illness when her son Oliver went back to school at Kenyon College, but just three weeks into his winter semester he suffered from a mental break. The signs were there. As a student athlete, Oliver was still participating in the school’s track program, but after he’d retreat to his room instead of heading off to class. He wasn’t hanging out with friends and stopped answering calls from his mom. And soon after, he recalled in a conversation with TIME, he started to hear voices. “I started forming these out-there ideas,” says Oliver, who asked not to include his last name. “I starting thinking a neighbor in my dorm was trying to kill me.” Because Oliver was 18, his mother wasn’t immediately notified about the change in his behavior. His friends and dorm mates were also ill-informed about the warning signs of a pending mental health crisis, so Oliver says there was no formal intervention until he got into an argument with members of the school’s lacrosse team. After that incident, he was admitted to a hospital and later transferred to its psychiatric ward. And it was then, despite trying to reach out to Oliver on a number of occasions and calling his track coach, that his mother became aware of his problem. “I didn’t receive any information until the hospital called me,” she says. What happened to Oliver and Dana is not at all uncommon. Though mental illness may not be at the forefront of parents’ and students’ minds when they go off to college, young adulthood is a critical period for mental health. Seventy five percent of mental illnesses are onset by age 24 and 43.8 million adults, about one in five, experienced a mental illness in 2012, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And yet the experiences students and parents have in dealing with mental illness can vary greatly from campus to campus, making it important for people to gain knowledge about what to expect, and what to look out for, imperative. Marjorie Baldwin’s son David was diagnosed with schizophrenia while he was in college, but when he first started exhibiting symptoms, she thought he was experimenting with drugs. But because the school he attended was two hours away from their home, David’s friends were the ones who stepped in during a psychotic episode and decided to call the police. “I think one thing that university students in general should is know the signs because for schizophrenia, at least, that’s the time when it develops,” Baldwin told TIME. “It’s their friends who may notice the symptoms and are able to step in.” On Wednesday, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in partnership with the Jed Foundation, [released a guidebook](http://nami.org/collegeguide) for students and parents that outlines warning signs for mental illness, resources available to students, and information parents need to know about getting access to their children’s health information. Their goal is to spark conversations between students and families around mental health issues, while also equipping folks with the tools they need to intervene or seek help if necessary. **Read More:** [_The National Alliance on Mental Illness Guidebook_](http://nami.org/collegeguide) “We are not talking enough about mental health,” says says Darcy Gruttadaro, the director of advocacy and public policy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. “Unfortunately it’s still a taboo topic.” Sonia Doshi recently graduated from the University of Michigan where she made working to erase the stigma that surrounds mental illness a personal goal. As a student advocate, she hosted an event called “Mental Health Monologues” where a small group of students shared their personal experiences with mental illness—from obsessive compulsive disorder to depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. She made a point to include the voices of people who are parts of heavily stigmatized communities including students of color, student athletes, and those under high academic stress who may feel a pressure to appear as if all is well. After her first show, when her parents wondered aloud to her why they didn’t treat visiting a therapist like going to the doctor, she knew they were on to something. “In the Indian community, and communities of people of color in general, mental health is not talked about in an open way,” she says. “Just to hear them say that made me feel like we were doing some good.” Awareness around mental health on college campuses has increased in recent years, in part because of a spate of high-profile suicides and tragedies that have centered around mental health crises. One of the worst cases was the massacre at Virginia Tech University, where a gunmen shot and killed 32 students and faculty and committed suicide. It was later revealed that as a student, the gunmen sought on-campus mental health services three times but was not treated effectively. But mental illness occurs across a spectrum, all aspects of which are represented on our nation’s campuses. According to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health located at Penn State University, which collects data from students who interact with mental health services on campus, anxiety, depression ,and academic stress are the main issues that drive young people to utilize those services. “College is a stressful time and it’s a major transition time in life,” says Gruttadaro. “Students are under high amounts of stress and their also exposed to a culture that they may have been sheltered from of drinking and marijuana use. There’s a lot of social pressure and a lot of academic pressure.” There’s also evidence that those who need counseling do not always get it. A survey from the American College Health Association found that while students report suffering from significant bouts of anxiety and depression, only 12% went to counseling. About 15% of students who commit suicide, the report found, got counseling on campus. The [Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s most recent report](http://ccmh.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3058/2016/01/2015%5FCCMH%5FReport%5F1-18-2015.pdf), released in 2015, did find an increase in students seeking mental health services over the past six years, which Gruttadaro says is a good sign. In fact, the study shows students are making counseling appointments at a rate seven times greater than the rate of enrollment at institutions. The report also found a steady increase in self harm among students who sought out services—32.9% of the students seriously considered suicide in 2015, compared to 23.8% in 2010\. The increased utilization of mental health centers on campus, says Ben Locke, the executive director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, shows that federal intervention efforts like the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, which funds to suicide prevention programs, have worked in getting people referred to facilities that can help them. “What we know is they’re walking in the door,” says Locke. “It’s not clear how or why they’re getting there at increased levels.” While students are able to get referred to services, what they receive when they get there varies; many schools lack the resources to help all students that need help. In Oliver’s case, his mother says he had an appointment to see a counselor, but the facility was far away from his dorm and he never went. Earlier this year, legislation was introduced in Congress that would increase funding for mental health services on college and university campuses. At Michigan, while the monologues helped foster conversations, they also helped Sonia realize the importance of mental health awareness among her peers. After, some students looked to her as expert, expressing worry that they didn’t know how they would respond if someone they knew told them about their experiences. “If we make everyone a first responder on our campus for mental health crisis that could really do something to change the environment,” she says. NAMI’s new guidelines hope to give students and parents the tools to help one another in a more effective way. Dana says had something like this existed for her son, who’s doing well now—and getting mostly A’s at a community college in their area—she can’t help but wonder if his episode would have been intense as it was. “If we had known the warning signs and what to look for it could have been different,” she says. **Correction:** _An earlier version of this post misstated when Oliver began to show signs of mental health problems. It was after returning from the winter break._ ## Transcript My name is Emma [ UNKNOWN ]. I am a junior at Columbia college. I am a visual arts major. On the first day of my sophomore year, I was raped by a fellow classmate. I didn't report at first because. It's a big emotional trauma, and I didn't feel like dealing with it at first, until I met at that time, two other women who told me the same person who had assaulted me, had assaulted them. The school found a way to dismiss each of our three cases separately. [ MUSIC ] My rapist, it still goes to my school, and still is on campus. [ MUSIC ]. This is not a single campus issue. This is not an individual issue. This is a cultural problem. We have a huge issue with rape culture on all college campuses. There was a study that was done that shows that men on college campuses who are perpetrators. Are more often than not repeat offenders. The average number of people a perpetrator will sexually assault is six, according to this study. So this isn't a random phenomenon. This isn't this happens in an alley, this happens when everyone's incredibly drunk at a party. There is a certain profile for what sexual assault looks like on a college campus. And that is why we need administrators to be open, and transparent, about that. Right now, their approach seems to be to ignore the problem, to try to deny students access to resources, to deny that that's happening at all when it fact they really should be getting in front of the issue. Our hearing took place seven months after I reported the incident. The investigator in my case didn't take down many important things such as the position I was in when he raped me. My hearing panelists weren't even trained, one woman kept asking me how it was physically possible for anal rape to happen. Why Columbia didn't find him responsible? I don't actually get to write a statement of what happened. It's all the investigator's statement that they read. There's an office called the Office of Gender Based and Sexual Misconduct. You go in there and at that time a woman was working there so I told her what had happened. She was the one who took erroneous notes, and missed really important that I said. Since her statement didn't make any sense, my case didn't make any sense. I think another reason that the school didn't find him guilty was that they, they really didn't want to treat it as a serial rape case because we, all three of us reported, and then they would say you are not allowed to mention each others' cases, we are going to treat them separately. I think that. If the hearing panel have had known that this was a serial offender, they might have believed us more maybe? They also said that there was not enough evidence to determine that it was more likely than not. That the respondent engaged in behavior that met the de, definition of sexual assault. So the charge was dismissed. [ MUSIC ] There are many reasons why a student would choose to not go to the police, and go to, you know, a campus adjudication process. Many people don't want the outcome to be the person that attacked them to go to jail. If you're a person of color. Or if you're ****, the process of going to the police can also be one that is not necessarily competent or great to deal with. Some people seek out resources from their school in order to make sure they're not living in the same dorm as a person who assaulted them, which is very different from making sure that someone goes to jail. And I also think that improving processes on campus across the board. Including you know, therapy for survivors, adequate rape crisis centers, and adequate academic interim measures, are things that are important for everyone to have the police absolutely cannot give you when you're a student. Everyday I'm afraid of leaving my room. Even seeing people who remotely look like my rapist is a scary thing for me. Last semester, I was working in the dark room in the photography department. Which is a small dark room. He asked permission from his teacher to come and work in the darkroom during my class. I started crying and hyperventilating and. As long as he's on campus with me he can continue to harass me. They're setting up for graduation for all of the seniors and all of the bleachers are coming up on campus. And, I was just thinking about the fact that. Because of what the administration did, I'm going to have to be sitting on those bleachers with my rapist and a serial rapist at that. Knowing that he's going to get the same education as me and I'll be feeling horrible on my graduation day. A lot of students think that when they go to a campus, if they see that there are zero sexual assaults reported that that's a really positive thing, that, that must mean that campus is incredibly safe, it's going to be a great place. But actually when you consider the fact that the overall rates of sexual assaults on campus are as high as one in four, if you see a campus reporting zero sexual assaults that should actually be a red flag. [ MUSIC ] I feel like it's taken over my entire, entire college experience. This happened on the first day of my sophomore year. And here I am. I just finished my last day of school for my junior year. And I'm still talking about it and still thinking about it. And I know that I'm going to look back on my entire Columbia experience and see that's how the administration has failed me. and. 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