"The University Lives Anxiety and De-pression": Diagnostic Uses and Affective Negotiations in Mental Health Care Services for University Students in Chile.

Abstract

The expansion of mental health discourses within the university has attained global relevance over the course of the past decade. This article focuses on the Chilean case, exploring the diagnostic uses and affective negotiations on campus. The findings presented are part of a broader qualitative research that examined the interrelations between the neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean university, the modes of anxious affection among students, and the strategies implemented by university mental health services. We argue that, although the neoliberalization of higher education in Chile has driven normative and subjective transformations, the phenomenon of university mental health involves students' agency. Our findings demonstrate that, for both mental health professionals and students, university life serves as a "catalyst of anxiety." Despite the existence of individualized diagnostic conceptions, they also allude to the inequalities inherent in the Chilean educational and health systems. We state that diagnostic uses involve strategies that students and professionals deploy to respond to the demands of adjustment/integration to universities, and even facilitate the possibility of re-imagining futures in the face of experiences of failure. Diagnostic uses engage affective negotiations in everyday situations, thereby configuring university life as a dynamic environment, subject to potential and permanent transformations.