In recent years, colleges and universities have loaded up on administrators and specialists who are there to help students “in crisis.” Are we overdoing it?
Yes, argues Dr. Loretta Breuning in today’s Martin Center article.
She writes that, “The Surgeon General warned of a ‘mental-health crisis’ among young people, adding urgency to long-standing concerns. Campuses are rushing to address these issues, but their efforts may do more harm than good because they’re rooted in the disease model of mental health.”
The disease model holds that emotional pain needs to be fixed, and, of course, there are lots of specialists eager to do that.
Students, Breuning writes, “have learned to see emotional pain as evidence that they are broken and need to be fixed. They’re trained to think others are happy all the time and they are missing out. They’re surrounded by dire warnings to ‘seek help’ if they have painful emotions.”
The problem, of course, is that painful emotions aren’t like disease. They’re part of life. “Realistic expectations about happiness,” Breuning concludes, “are the best thing we can teach our students.”
Yes, but instead, most colleges mess them up with talk about a mental-health “crisis” coupled with divisive blather about race, intersectionality, white privilege, and so on.