The institutional roots of the mental health crisis

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The initiatives implemented this year in support of students struggling with permanent or temporary mental health issues have been incredible. From the provincial government’s commitment to mental health, to McMaster’s Arrive and Thrive plan on mental health and wellbeing, advocacy has come a long way.

However, this advocacy has been heavily focused on reducing the stigma and dealing with the shortage of response staff, but has lacked in addressing the conditions that created what we call the mental health crisis on campus. As a generation of students and young people, we are faced with more complex financial and employment struggles than the generations before us.

At Mac we’ve seen the creation of the Peer Support Line as a service that provides quick support and referrals to students in crisis or who need someone to talk to, and an increase in mental health-related groups and programs offered by the Student Wellness Centre. Even the Arrive and Thrive plan focuses on closing the gap in service provision and dealing with the symptoms of mental health issues instead of addressing the root of the problem.   

Issues of anxiety and depression appear to have become so common in the university environment that it doesn’t come as a surprise that so many people deal with them at some point during or throughout their post-secondary education.

Conversations about feeling hopeless, supporting friends who are suicidal, or going through some sort of crisis have become normalized. We’ve focused our collective efforts on supporting and learning how to take care of others and ourselves.

I’m not arguing that these approaches are useless or counterproductive. The reduction of the stigma towards mental health issues and the availability of more services that support students only have positive impacts, but we might be forgetting something important in the process.

This focus on support and healthy coping has reduced mental health advocacy to a conversation about how we can help the individual struggling with these problems, not addressing the larger issues that cause them in the first place. It shifts the discussion from the mental health crisis in post-secondary education as a societal phenomenon to an issue of individual responsibility. This is not done in the sense that each student is left to their own devices, but that these new services and resources address individual symptoms and effects of the larger phenomenon.

University is inherently a high-pressure environment. But this is not new—it has always been challenging. The material taught and what’s asked of students didn’t suddenly become more difficult in the last few years, but mental health issues are rising.

I don’t think we can talk about this phenomenon without talking about rising tuition rates, lack of government financial aid, low prospective employment in all fields, and the uncertain nature of higher education. These were issues recognized when the mental health crisis on campus first garnered mainstream attention, yet we’ve seen that the focus of mental health advocacy efforts has been on destigmatizing and support services.

Our discourse on mental health in post-secondary education cannot be decoupled from larger institutional issues that are often at the root of the struggles that students experience.

This is not to minimize the importance of dealing with the health of those who struggle with chronic disorders. Support staff, services, and resources that serve students with mental health issues should be better funded and receive the attention they deserve.

As university students at the center of these conversations, we have to reevaluate our conversations about mental health in post-secondary education. This is not just about how we deal with the pressures of university, or how we can support each other as we go through years of worrying about our uncertain futures.

The issues at the core of the mental health crisis need to be addressed, and there needs to be a balance between recognizing the problem and providing support to students who are caught suffering the consequences of these misguided policies.

In the meantime, the prevalence of mental health issues in university should not be over-normalized. This encourages a disturbing complacency to the conditions that are putting our generation through these struggles in the first place.

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