The rampage carried out nearly a year ago by a deranged Virginia Tech student who slipped through the mental health system has changed how US colleges reach out to troubled students.
Administrators are pushing students harder to get help, looking more aggressively for signs of trouble and urging faculty to speak up when they have concerns. Counselors say the changes are sending even more students their way, which is both welcome and a challenge, since many lack the resources to handle their growing workloads.
Behind those changes, colleges have edged away from decades-old practices that made student privacy paramount. Now, they are more likely to err on the side of sharing information — with the police, for instance, and parents — if there is any possible threat to community safety. But even some who say the changes are appropriate worry it could discourage students from seeking treatment.
Concerns also linger that the response to shooters like Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five others at Northern Illinois University, has focused excessively on boosting the capacity of campus police to respond to rare, terrible events.
Such reforms may be worthwhile, but they don’t address how to prevent such a tragedy in the first place.
It was last April 16, just after 7am, that Cho killed two students in a Virginia Tech dormitory, the start of a shooting spree that eventually claimed 33 lives, including his own.
Cho’s behavior and writing had alarmed professors and administrators, as well as the campus police, and he was put through a commitment hearing where he was found to be potentially dangerous.
But when an off-campus psychiatrist sent him back to the school for outpatient treatment, there was no follow-up to ensure he got it.
People who work every day in the campus mental health field — counselors, lawyers, advocates and students at colleges around the country — put the changes they have seen since the Cho shootings into three broad categories.
Faculty are speaking up more about students who worry them. That’s accelerating a trend of more demand for mental health services that was already underway before the Virginia Tech shootings. David Wallace, director of counseling at the University of Central Florida, said teachers are paying closer attention to violent material in writing assignments — warning bells that had worried Cho’s professors.
“Now people are wondering, ‘Is this is something that could be more ominous?’” he said. “‘Are we talking about the Stephen Kings of the future or about somebody who’s seriously thinking about doing something harmful?’” Mississippi State and the University of Kentucky are among the schools creating teams involving people such as resident advisers, teachers, administrators and campus police to try to identify troubled students.
The downside is officials may be hypersensitive to any eccentricity. Says Susan Davis, an attorney who works in student affairs at the University of Virginia: “There’s no question there’s some hysteria and there’s some things we don’t need to see.” That’s a problem because counseling centers already had their hands full. A survey last fall by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors found colleges on average have just one counseling staffer for every 1,941 students. Those ratios could decline given that some colleges are adding staff, but in many states the ratios are still well below the nationally recommended guideline of one counselor per 1,500 students.
Meanwhile, according to the American College Health Association, about 10 percent of college students have considered suicide in the last 12 months, and more than 1,000 commit suicide annually.
In Virginia, a measure signed into law Wednesday by Governor Tim Kaine requires colleges to bring parents into the loop when dependent students may be a danger to themselves or others. Even before Virginia Tech, Cornell University had begun treating students as dependents of their parents unless told otherwise, giving the school more leeway to contact parents without students’ permission.
“Nobody’s throwing privacy out the window, but we are coming out of an era when individual rights were paramount on college campuses,” said Brett Sokolow, who advises colleges on risk management.
The big change since the Virginia Tech shootings, legal experts say, is colleges have shed some of their fear of violating the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Many faculty hadn’t realized that the law applies only to educational records, not observations of classroom behavior, or that it contains numerous exceptions for potential safety threats.
Still, while conversations with therapists almost always stay private, some worry about the perception that confidentiality is no longer the top priority. There’s no way to measure how many students aren’t getting treatment.
“The real balancing act is, are you chilling the mental health treatment you want these students to receive?” said UVA’s Davis. “Are they going to stop going to these centers because there’s this state law out there that says you have to call mom and dad?”
As news of the Virginia Tech shootings broke, Erica Hamilton was one of many people who worried the violence could lead prompt a backlash against the mentally ill, discouraging treatment and leading to misguided new laws.
“I was really nervous,” said Hamilton, a student at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro who works with Active Minds, a mental health advocacy group. “It shined a negative light on people who have mental illness.” On balance, Hamilton says that hasn’t happened. But the tone of some of the debate remains a concern.
Sokolow estimated in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and NIU shootings, the schools he works with spent US$25 on police and communications for every US$1 on mental health. Only recently has he seen a shift.
At Florida’s public universities, the board of governors last month approved an US$18 million request to the legislature to fund police and emergency warning systems that a state task for called for. The board also approved recommendations of a task force on mental health care, which found Florida schools needed 92 more counselors to reach the recommended ratio. But there has been no funding request yet. The report suggested the state lift caps on student fees.
Bill Edmonds, a spokesman for Florida’s board, said it recognizes the need for more counselors and is exploring ways to fund them.
“Campuses come to me, they want me to help them start behavioral intervention systems, Sokolow said. “Then they go to the president to get the money and, oh, well, the money went into the door locks.” Phone messaging systems and security are nice, he said, but “there is nothing about text-messaging that is going to prevent violence.”
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