My Arabic instructor, as it turns out, is not the only faculty member who decided to quit in the middle of the semester because of sudden mental issues. The same thing is happening at several other departments. This is unprecedented.
I’m telling you, people are losing it but I don’t know why.
Clarissa's Blog 
“same thing is happening at several other departments. This is unprecedented”
I honestly can’t say I’m noticing anything like that where I am…. there are… trends that had started before the pandemic and are slightly increasing but nothing radical. The introduction of the cursed Bologna system has gutted lots of masters (magister) programs because students start work after the BA (here called “licencjat”) now. Senior faculty of course are not noticing and blaming students for not being serious enough….
Fashionable ideas like transgenderism are slowly increasing (again about what you’d expect and not a radical increase – I had one trans student last year, and one this year (also Ukrainian) and maybe another who hasn’t shown up to class yet…. It’s a thing now but no big drama. The university is cancelling classes one day next week for crazy-people-day (my own name, not official) about mental healthcare for students (which is actually long overdue so I can’t complain too much).
On the other hand, the big dust-up that led to the elimination and rebuilding of where I used to work into three factions was led by impatient younger faculty who wanted to push older colleagues out to pasture sooner (and an administrator who wanted to absorb a very profitable major). So in terms of younger faculty… I don’t have the contacts I used to so maybe they’re falling apart, which would serve them right….
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I am with the University of London and practically every other email is about mental health and I’m not exaggerating. There is even a whole department (UoLwellbeing) entirely devoted to it.
I see a lot of young students simply unable to cope with difficulties in an adult way. In many cases the effects of helicopter parenting are quite evident.
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“practically every other email is about mental health”
I’ve gotten a couple which I actually think is good given that until very recently there was nothin’ at all.
But I can’t get past the feeling that it’s rapidly surging past the ‘this is an important resource’ stage and getting into the ‘all the cool kids have mental health issues” stage.
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Where I work we had eight student suicides on campus in the past 15 months. We also (understandably) get a lot of emails about mental health. We now have mental health days incorporated into the semester schedule. Our counseling center is overwhelmed. Plus, more students have all kinds of serious health problems. I do not remember anything like it in all my years of teaching. There is more going on than the helicopter parenting. This took a fast turn for worse after we fully came back after Covid.
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Right? I also saw it devolve precipitously after everybody come back in full. I literally had 14 out of 30 students drop out of my class because of anxiety, stress, depression, etc. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
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What causes this, though? Everybody observes the phenomenon but what’s the cause?
Is there anybody on here who’s struggling in this way? What do you think causes it for you?
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Do these kids have access to decent healthcare other than psych services?
I dropped out of my junior year basically because stress and vegetarianism/malnutrition trashed my thyroid (I got better– only took 8 years). That causes a surprising number of interesting “mental health” symptoms, including depression, hallucinations, extreme fatigue, frequent migraine… but also some quite nasty physical ones that should be obvious to a real doctor (such as always feeling cold, hair loss, brittle nails, eczema, irregular cycles…), but are often overlooked in favor of “take this psych medication” or “go on The Pill”. The emphasis on mental health is also a great way to tell people who have very real physical problems “it’s all in your head” and ensure that they stay sick for as long as possible. I don’t know if that’s doctors’ laziness, lack of time/interest, or cultivating repeat customers, but it’s a thing.
Is it possible they’re just undernourished and overmedicated… more than kids were a few years ago? Everybody encourages them to take care of their mental health (what does that even mean?), and nobody tells them to eat more red meat, take a multivitamin, spend time outdoors, cut back on fried foods and alcohol…
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I think you make an excellent point. I see that kids generally don’t take good care of themselves and get sick a lot. I do actually mention in class, prefacing that I know they are adults and that this is just motherly advice they can take or leave, that they need to get regular sleep, avoid pulling all-nighters, eat a variety of foods, take vitamins, exercise, consider getting flu shots, etc. Just generally take care of their physical health. It makes no sense for me, a fifty-year-old woman, to have fewer colds and random viral infections than the members of the physically healthiest demographic (young people in their late teens and early twenties). Last year after class, when one kid kept complaining about getting sick over and over, I had to say things such as “Once you get well following a cold or a similar illness, wash your sheets and towels, but also change your toothbrush so you don’t get re-infected.” Apparently the toothbrush thing was complete news to many of them.
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My Arabic Fulbrighter used this American worship of mental issues to her advantage to have an all-expense paid trip to the US and then claim she’s depressed and leave in the middle of the semester. I discovered yesterday that she was lying to me the whole time. She never activated the LMS, never conducted a single assessment, never gave a single grade in her course. And the Fulbright people let her completely off the hook because she claimed mental issues.
We have another even more egregious situation at the department in this vein but I can’t give details because there’s an actual lawsuit going on.
I have a colleague who developed a chronic immune condition because of COVID. The university refused to accommodate. But anybody who claims anxiety or depression is immediately given everything they want no matter how egregious. You don’t even need a diagnosis. You just have to say you are too upset to work. It bogglese the mind.
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There is definitely an increase in the number of students who can’t seem to handle college, and we are not helping by telling them that normal phenomena are pathological (of course you are nervous before the test; that’s not necessarily test anxiety that needs to be medicated or requires accommodation; in fact, I’d be more surprised if you never got nervous before a test). Plenty of students are unable to meet deadlines, follow instructions, or simply keep themselves fed, cleaned, and rested enough to successfully tackle college workload.
I also wish we could go to a time where I know less about my grad students’ myriad personal and mental-health woes. Perhaps it’s better that they feel free to talk about it now, but why do I need to know the minutiae of their private lives? I am not a trained therapist. I am here to aid their professional development, teach them the ropes in the field, teach them the math, physics, coding, teach them to write papers and present, how to move in the professional sphere. Why is that not enough? I am not an unreasonable boss, nor am I someone who doesn’t allow people time off, or to strike a work-life balance, or whatever. I would love for all of us to go back to being friendly but professional.
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“an increase in the number of students who can’t seem to handle college”
We are definitely seeing the same at my university. It was a growing issue for years and got much worse in 2020-2022. Things actually seemed to be getting better in spring 2023, but now they seem much worse again in the current semester. Several of my TAs have a bunch of students getting 30-40% on their tests or just not showing up for tests or anything at all. We have always had the occasional student who was a total washout, but now it seems to be a solid 10-20% that are just completely incapable of doing anything.
In terms of what’s causing it, I think it can be incredibly hard to regain mental balance once it is lost. We have a lot of things in the modern world that push people towards imbalance – social media, video games, addiction to various electronic stimuli, excessive drug and/or alcohol use, increasing isolation/decreasing sense of community. And the COVID period just ramped all of that up. I think it will be many years before some people are able to right themselves.
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Yes, I saw that soon. It got better in the spring but then collapsed completely this semester. This has to mean there’s another large factor besides COVID.
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You had suggested previously that people were either thriving or collapsing post-Covid, part of me wonders if the improvement I/we saw in the spring is because so many of the collapsing students completely washed out after the fall semester and were gone in the spring. I know my university always has lower total enrollment in the spring than the fall because the number of students graduating plus the number of first-years that don’t come back after the fall semester is much larger than the number of students that start in the spring. I heard the Fall 2020 to Spring 2021 numbers on first-year drop outs were the highest ever, but I didn’t hear anything about those numbers since.
I can honestly imagine that parents whose kids came home after the first semester with Cs might still be willing to help pay for the second semester thinking that the kids were just struggling with the adjustment. But there are no parents out there who would help with a second semester for a kid who came home with straight Fs.
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I’ve noticed that, too, starting during the pandemic. I’ve been teaching for twenty years, and never before 2020 did we consistently get these tails in the grade distribution that stretched toward the 30s and 40s. Our enrollments have also been going up, and I think we admit a lot of kids who just can’t hack it. They don’t show up for class, get awful scores (completely shocking given they never show up for class), and we’re expected to pass them? I don’t know what they think they’re getting from their education. They’re definitely not learning anything.
I agree it’s probably very hard to regain footing once you lose it. Many young people seem to have no restorative mechanisms for when they get kicked (or kick themselves) out of equilibrium, for example when they get dumped by a boyfriend/girlfriend or fail a class. Increasing isolation is a key component of the issue, for sure. I am old yet I, too, forget that there is a whole world out there, with real people and real relationships and food and nature and laughter and lots of olfactory and tactile experiences, and that our little electronic bubbles are bullshit and far from the whole world. We all need to be reminded of it, repeatedly. I am not sure the Internet is a net positive for the human race.
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Then again…. could it simply be a function of admissions policy?
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We admit everybody who applies and a bunch of people who don’t. :-))) We have no admission standards. The assumption is that not being able to succeed in college is not a real thing.
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Has this changed in the last ten years? Or has it always been this way?
Could there have been some change in the advice that highschool guidance counselors are giving– anything that may have shuffled up what kids are attending college vs. not going?
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That we are admitting weaker students is a possibility. My university is not particularly hard to get into, but it is a little harder than Clarissa’s. It used to be that if you were in the top 50% of your high school class it was automatic admission and they only scrutinized those in the bottom 50% and often gave them conditional admissions that required remedial coursework. They changed things around a few years ago and eliminated the top 50% system, but the new system was supposed to have very similar results. I’ve heard that there have been moves to scale back the remedial coursework requirements and they have made some changes to general education requirements to eliminate or soften some of the more unpopular ones. The administrative types are also very worried about enrollment because there is supposedly a demographic cliff looming in our region that will result in a much smaller population of traditional aged students in our region. Our enrollments have not gone down, but community college enrollments and many small liberal arts college enrollments in our region are down.
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“Everybody observes the phenomenon but what’s the cause?”
You can’t get there without a map, which in this case is a systems theory about what as well as why.
Let’s try a few data points:
1) A recent study about COVID-19 “vaxx” acceptance shows high correlations between getting it and two factors: being from a relatively wealthy country and having signs of neuroticism.
2) Metabolic stress: check a list of the potential symptoms, too many to list here.
3) Both COVID-19 and the COVID-19 “vaxx” may induce metabolic stress.
4) Neurotics tend toward negative reactions that amplify stress.
5) Group situations tend to draw in neurotics for modes of self-treatment.
So you have small groups of neurotics who amplified their existing stress, piled on metabolic stress, and then got involved in group situations (such as your university settings) where they would attempt to self-treat their stress in ways involving people around them.
Non-neurotics then have to deal with modes of neurotic stress that they would otherwise avoid being exposed to, and so they may seek out self-treatment or believe that they need to talk at length about the problems, including within institutional communications conduits.
When people do this, they produce a type of memetic contagion that occupies these mental spaces with various products of stress, some of which may appear urgent, all of which tend to dominate context and history.
It’s these context and history dominating aspects that create what eventually becomes a partially or fully self-sustaining hysteresis loop, in which the continued talking about the problems comes to be a way in which the memetic contagion continues to be able to live.
As a mind form rather than a physical contagion, such a thing would be difficult to isolate as qualia except in terms of the shadow of its negative effects, and even then most people would prefer not to believe that they’re giving life to a mind form that strips people of their agency.
But that’s how it works, and if people talk enough about it without forming some systemic theories about what to do with it, they risk having the memetic contagion take on autopoietic aspects, in which the thing develops a life of its own.
Think about Edward Bernays and his “logic-proof compartments”, then think of how hard it is to get rid of such things as superstitions (or at least talk about them as unwanted system effects), then think of how you may have yourself perpetuated one of these things not knowing the potential risks.
Ultimately you have to feed this thing the kind of energy it hates or reduce the energy it likes, with the hope that you can make it burn itself out by consuming too much attention.
So do you now see how your question demands the creation of an accurate map to this territory?
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