Mental Health Screening Helps Create Proactive System

Carefully thought out treatment plans are vastly more efficient and less exhausting than reacting to mental health crises as they happen. But to create a proactive environment on campus, you have to know who is at-risk or already exhibiting symptoms. Mental health screening – through both in-person events and year-round, online programming – is an important tool that can help you reach that goal.

“Knowing who students are before they are in crisis saves lives and relieves the burden on services,” says Richard Kadison, MD, chief of Mental Health Services at Harvard University Health Services and co-author of the book, College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It. “Colleges are supposed to educate kids, not be a health care system. But what many administrators fail to realize is that emotional well-being and academic success are linked,” says Kadison.

A 2004 survey of college counseling center directors found that 86% reported an increase in students with severe psychological problems in recent years. The number of students who reported “having ever been diagnosed with depression” has increased by 4.6 percentage points over a four-year time span, according to the latest results from the ACHA-National College Health Assessment. In the spring 2004 survey, 14.9% of students reported that they had ever been diagnosed with depression; within this number, 25.2% said they are currently in therapy for depression and 38% said they are currently taking medication for depression.

CollegeResponse – the parent program of National Depression Screening Day, National Alcohol Screening Day and the National Eating Disorders Screening – helps colleges identify students most at-risk through screening and education. Over the past several years, the program has grown from screening in-person on a designated day to screening year round by participating in the online screening program. By participating in CollegeResponse schools can:

  • Raise awareness about mental health disorders;
  • Educate the college community about symptoms and effective treatments/resources;
  • Offer hard-to-reach students the opportunity to be screened
  • Connect those in need of treatment to the resources that can help them; and
  • Enhance the school’s risk management policy/procedures.

“Screening for mental health and alcohol problems – both in-person and online – promotes early detection among the student population. If the screenings suggest a likelihood of one or more disorder, students are referred for further evaluation,” says Douglas Jacobs, MD, President & CEO of Screening for Mental Health, the non-profit organization that sponsors CollegeResponse. “Once students are aware that they have access to free, anonymous screenings, they are more likely to seek treatment for themselves and recommend these resources to their friends.”

Harvard University is one of the more than 530 colleges that participated in the CollegeResponse program last year. By holding their National Depression Screening Day event at a health fair, using students to recruit other students to be screened and raffling off an iPod, the health services was able to screen more than 700 students in one day. The university has also screened more than 1,400 students through the online screening program. “I am a big fan of the online screening. If a student is feeling stressed out at 3:00 a.m., they can take the online screening and get the mental health service emergency number,” says Kadison.

For more information, or to register for CollegeResponse, call (781) 239-0071 or visit www.mentalhealthscreening.org/college.

                                                     ###