60% of college students have mental illness, er, parental malpractice

New Concerns Arise About Mental Health Of College Students

"Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder.

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60% of college students have mental illness, er, parental malpractice

New Concerns Arise About Mental Health Of College Students

"Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder.

“What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” says Dr. Beresin. “If you add them all up 50% doesn’t seem that high."

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“Living alone, not being prepared to be on your own,” says Dr. Beresin. “Peer pressure. I mean, the ability to kind of freely use alcohol or drugs and make those decisions on your own without supervision.'"

Ok, being an adult is hard, and we are surely not preparing our children for adulthood. We raise children, and at 18, they are still children, but we ship them off to college. This is a bad idea, but that's what is happening.

Humorously, this is exactly what the children's parents want for them. 

These helicopter parents made high school into daycare, and are now making college into daycare. It will never end. Best bet is to actually raise responsible adults by teaching the children when they are children, up to about age 12, then slowly but surely layering on responsibilities over the next 6 years until at age 18 they are actually adults. Not just able to drive, but actually do adult things like banking, investing, working for income, managing money, and budget, planning ahead, making life decisions, dating, and creating a positive life balance between work, studies, and good hard play. 

Or wait till they are 26, then pray. 

These kids don't have mental illness, they have helicopter parents who never allowed them to fail, or taught them to be adults. Get over it, move on and start learning the necessary adult skills on your own. This is what adults do, it is what distinguishes adults from children. Stop listening to doc downer, ignore your helicopter mom and dad, and get on with life. Humans have done this since we became human, get to it!

During college my brother, and I commonly worked about 15 weeks per year (I averaged about 60 hours per week at a paper mill), we took full time classes (I nearly always overloaded taking between 19 and 24 credits per term), we waterskied, hiked, camped, backpacked 60 days or so in the summer, often after work, we snow skied 20-30 time per year including an annual spring break trip to places like Jackson Hole, or Sun Valley, we kayaked, and camped for about 2 weeks each spring, and camped and canoed for about 2 weeks in fall (yeah, we skipped school sometimes). And still had time to ride bikes a few hundred miles per week, or run two dozen miles per week , or play racket ball, or squash, or go sand ski the Oregon Dunes, or something. 

Kids today seem to limit themselves, and schedule themselves slavishly to school work. They have accepted activities. It is almost like their entire life is scheduled. This is silly. Work hard, but play even harder, and make sure it is fun play. I liked dating so I nearly always had a woman to spend time with, and that was as valuable as anything for making my life livable. And I always took her with, it made everything more enjoyable.

I am always shocked when I find high school kids heading off to college who have never been on a vacation on their own, never had a job, never washed their own cloths, or made their own meals, other than a simple sandwich, and are obviously not ready for life after mom. Increasingly these are more common. This is parental malpractice, at the expense of the children, and they remain children long after they leave for college. 

PS - The good doc is a psychiatrist, so take what he says with a grain of salt.