Devanshi: Just so nonchalant about it.
Devanshi: And it’s a very preprofessional school. You’re put into this environment where people don’t just have their major figured out, but supposedly have their life figured out—even the next ten years planned out. So if you don’t, it’s like, “Well, what am I even doing?”
As a freshman in 2014, Kathryn actually planned her suicide. She had written dozens of goodbye letters to friends and family; she’d even picked the location. “It’s never just one thing that leads someone to that place,” she said. “It’s multiple factors. It felt like everyone else had their lives together and no one else was feeling so alone, struggling so much, and having all these identity questions. I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t see a way to live up to my expectations, my parents’ expectations, my friends’ expectations.”
But then in the days before she could carry out her plan, the resident advisor in her dorm—the same one where Madison lived, in fact—staged an intervention. The woman did so because everyone in the dorm was discussing warning signs of depression. Essentially, they were on high alert. Kathryn took a leave of absence and returned to Penn a year later. In the time since, she’s read everything she can about mental health, including the current state of college counseling—at Penn and elsewhere.
In the past three years, Penn has improved its counseling system. The upgrade was in response to the fact that six students, including Madison, died by suicide during a thirteen-month period, from 2013 to 2014. The tragedies led to a task force, which led to the hiring of additional counselors and the counseling center moving to a bigger space. The improvements allowed the school to cut its wait time for an initial appointment from 13.2 days (the average from 2012 to 2013) to just two to three. Yet even as Penn has attempted to improve its counseling services, as well as to acknowledge its on-campus culture, suicides have continued: six additional students have taken their lives since 2014, approximately twice the national average.
This problem, this crush of struggling students, is not unique to Penn. Colleges across the country are dealing with an overload of cases. The counseling centers of many universities are staffed and funded at essentially the same level they were twenty years ago, before the rise in the number of students with mental health issues. For a long time, college counseling centers were adequate. Students who needed help with issues big or small could easily schedule an appointment. Over the past ten years, though, on many college campuses these spaces have morphed into the equivalent of an overtrafficked emergency room. According to the American Psychological Association, 76.6 percent of counseling center directors said they are having to reduce the number of visits with noncrisis patients in order to cope with the growing number of cases. There’s a name for that practice: it’s called triage.
Exactly when do our young people have time to develop their own sense of self? When are they able to be alone, to understand how they think, what they really want—without the pretense of how it might look on a college application?
And we’re not just talking high school students; this practice of hovering often begins before they’ve learned how to write. Kids used to grow up in the neighborhood—on the block or in the parks, playing games with other kids. These games had rules, but the kids themselves determined them, flexing their imaginations. Social scientists call these activities—capture the flag, bike races, pickup baseball games—“free play,” and it’s been steadily decreasing since the 1950s. Scientists have also noted a correlation between the decreasing amount of childhood free play—any play not directed by adults—and the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among kids. As free play decreases, anxiety increases. Correlation does not equal causation, but considering that free play helps kids develop their sense of self, their problem-solving abilities, their ability to self-soothe, and their ability to play well with others, it’s not a stretch to see why scientists believe the decrease in free play is possibly affecting their mental health.
In the article “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Pathology,” which appeared in the American Journal of Play, author Peter Gray cites the work of psychologist Jean Twenge, who discusses how too many kids are chasing goals over which they have minimal control. Gray writes:
Developing competence at an activity that one enjoys, making friends, finding meaning in life, and pursuing a heartfelt religious path are examples of intrinsic goals. Getting high grades in school, making lots of money, achieving high status, and looking good to others are examples of extrinsic goals. Twenge argues convincingly that there has been a continual shift away from intrinsic toward extrinsic values in the culture at large and among young people in particular, promoted in part by the mass marketing of consumer goods through television and other media. She refers also to evidence that the pursuit of extrinsic goals at the expense of intrinsic goals correlates with anxiety and depression. It seems reasonable that this would be true.
Gray later writes: “Humans are extraordinarily adaptive to changes in their living conditions, but not infinitely so.” Now add in social media. Is there anything you have less control over than how many likes you receive on a photo? As scholar William Deresiewicz has written, we have created a generation of world-class hoop jumpers, of “excellent sheep,” of young people who know what they’re supposed to say, but not necessarily why they’re saying it. We’re teaching young people what to think, but not how to think. Deresiewicz writes:
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.