Each of them took turns sharing their own stories from the first three months of school, with most of them touching on the same overarching theme: Ugh, this is hard; I hope it gets better. Within that context, nothing Maddy shared over Thanksgiving about how she was feeling drastically separated her from the group. They all knew she was struggling; but so were they, and when you’re stuck in the valley, it’s difficult to see that perhaps some peaks are sharper, higher, and more dangerous than others. In fact, when you’re in the valley, it’s difficult to look up at all. Putting one foot in front of the other is hard enough. “Everybody was a little bit rocky—you’re the new kid at school—so it was hard to think about having to go back to college, to keep balancing school and track,” Emma said. “We were all kind of like, ‘This isn’t exactly what we expected it to be like, but we have to go back and figure it out.’ And Maddy and I were both upset with everything.”
When she was with her friends, Madison found it much easier to pretend she was mostly fine. She had always been the axis around which all of them rotated, the one who directed their social calendar, made sure they ended up at the right parties. Maddy was always on her grind, when it came to both work and play. Their friend group was seven strong: Maddy was the glue. Emma was down-to-earth, genuine, an Energizer Bunny. Jackie was adventurous and spontaneous. Brooke was easygoing and carefree. Erin was work hard–play hard, like Maddy, and always up for anything. MJ was a perfectionist, also like Maddy, and her parents were the strictest. Justine was sarcastic and funny. She and MJ split the “mom” role within the group, looking out for everyone and sometimes passing on social events because they were homebodies.
Maddy had always enjoyed going out, just like any teenager. But that holiday season, according to her friends, her partying took on an edge. Her parents had never worried about Maddy’s social life, because she had never let it interfere with her schoolwork or her athletics. They knew their daughter partied, but they always said, “She plays hard, but she works hard, too.”
Jim and Stacy were surprised at how quickly college had overwhelmed their daughter. “I was definitely caught off guard, because it just wasn’t her,” Stacy said. “I don’t know, all she talked about was going to Penn, and how excited she was about it, and then here she was, and it was just not what she was expecting.”
That week, they recognized that she needed to see somebody, a professional, not someone associated with the school but somebody with more experience dealing with serious mental health crises. “We saw a big change over Thanksgiving,” Jim said. “I think everything got really serious. There was a shift. She had so much anxiety. It was still in the vein of ‘I’m not enjoying this.’ But you could also sense it was more.” They found Maddy a therapist near Allendale, and she never used Penn counseling again.
Jim and Ashley drove Madison back to Penn on Sunday. The traffic on I-95 was bumper-to-bumper. Madison seemed anxious. More storm clouds had rolled in: finals. They were now only two weeks away, and she had no idea what to expect.
Active Minds
I am driving to Philadelphia to meet with the Penn students who lead the school’s chapter of Active Minds, a national organization whose mission statement includes the following: “empowering students to change the perception about mental health on college campuses.”
The four of us meet on the ground floor of a dormitory. We pull together two circular tables, make a figure eight, then pull up chairs at odd angles. There is much ground to cover. I want their thoughts on what life is like at Penn; whether they believe the environment at Penn is different from that at other schools; and if so, how?
I am here because Madison wanted to be, but couldn’t. One night, Madison scrolled through a list of clubs at Penn. She wanted to see what else the school had to offer. She was daydreaming about the free time she would have if she stopped running, and what she might do with it. As she read through the list, she considered the description of each club and took screenshots of the ones that interested her. She clustered the images on the bottom right of her desktop: Penn Fashion Collective, Christian Students at Penn, Art Club, AsOne Global at Penn, and Active Minds.
Then she texted Ingrid:
Maddy: Just went through an entire list of all the clubs at Penn. Got some solid options.
Ingrid: What clubs stuck out to you?
Maddy: Penn fashion collective, Christian students at penn, art club, AsOne global at penn.
Notice anything missing?
This omission is not at all surprising. A gulf seems to exist, into which thousands of college students are falling. Some are trying to get help, but the right kind of help isn’t available. Some aren’t even trying, because college is supposedly about being cool and having fun, and admitting feelings of anxiety, sadness, and helplessness seems like the opposite. Attending a meeting about mental health doesn’t carry the same social currency as going to a frat party and posting an awesome picture on Instagram. Others know they need help, commit to finding it, and get better. But many, like Maddy, are stuck in a gray area: aware that they need something and vaguely reaching for it, but not really sure what’s going on inside them.
Rates of depression and anxiety among college students are higher than ever. The specific numbers vary, depending on the study, but all show a disturbing trend. According to the American College Health Association, the suicide rate among fifteen-to twenty-four-year-olds has tripled since the 1950s. An annual survey of college freshmen found that 30 percent reported feeling overwhelmed, with that number rising to 40.5 percent among women. This is the highest percentage registered since the survey started in 1985, at which point the numbers were approximately half what they are now. One study found that an average high school student today likely deals with as much anxiety as did a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.
The numbers are eye-opening everywhere you look: 95 percent of college counseling directors said students with significant psychological problems constitute a major concern. From 1994 to 2012, the percentage of college students who sought help and were prescribed psychiatric medications rose from 9 percent (in 1994) to 17 percent (in 2000) to 20 percent (in 2003) to 25 percent (in 2006), a number that stabilized through 2012.
And here’s a particularly problematic statistic: according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, while 7 percent of parents reported their college students experiencing mental health issues, fully 50 percent of students rated their mental health below average or poor. In other words, even those closest to college kids often have no clue how they’re really feeling. The data, the papers, the surveys—they go on for hundreds of pages. And they all point to the same conclusion: a serious mental health issue exists on our college campuses.
Over the past fifteen years or so, therapists have been processing what they’ve been seeing and hearing. And they talk about these issues in ways that feel very human, very real. In response to the transcript of an NPR episode from 2015, “Colleges Face Soaring Mental Health Demands,” a therapist with more than twenty years of experience and a student at the University of Maryland posted the following messages.