Handling stress on campus

As high school students across the country try on caps and gowns and settle their plans for college, some will be matriculating this fall with some heavy baggage.

Rising concerns about mental-health challenges among today's teenagers are prompting some colleges to try to do more to help troubled kids - even before the students arrive at college. Such efforts to give more attention to mental-health awareness follow highly publicized student suicides at universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Healthcare professionals say adolescence is a key point at which to intervene. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for those ages 15 to 24, and was the second leading cause of death among college students in 1998, according to the National Mental Health Association.

Some see a connection between the rhythms of college-student life and the peaks in the suicide rate, which occur in late spring and throughout the summer. In May, for example, the overall suicide rate is 18 percent higher than in December, according to published reports.

"The number of students we see [at the clinic] doubles from October to November and mid-March to May. That's when the stress of exams falls," says Richard Kadison, University Health Services mental-health service director at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

In a recent survey of college freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles, more than 30 percent said they often felt "overwhelmed."

Nationwide, 1 in 10 college students has been diagnosed with depression. Heath experts warn that existing mental-health issues, when combined with academic pressure, can undermine a student's feelings of competence and peace of mind.

"[Increased depression] does warrant increased awareness and education in high school," says Dr. Kadison. "The number of depressed, suicidal adolescents is even more [troubling]."

Few high schools, though, are well-equipped to address psychological issues. High school guidance counselors are often responsible for several hundred students, and their role is limited. A student often doesn't see a health professional unless parents seek a private evaluation, and many families don't have healthcare coverage to pay for it.

"Students start out more stressed," says Sherry Benton, assistant director of counseling services at Kansas State University. "They really try to do a lot of résumé building to a far larger degree than they did a decade ago. They feel pressured to achieve, achieve, achieve." She and other counselors see in this pressure the seeds of anxiety and depression.

Psychotropic medications - such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft - are increasingly being prescribed for students who say they might not otherwise handle college.

"We see more students coming in from high school on medication already," Kadison says.

Though concerns are rising, too, about the number of kids taking psychotropic drugs, others say psychiatric treatment is enabling more kids to attend who otherwise never could have coped with the stresses of college.

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