What Crisis? Competing Narratives of Mental Health in US Higher Education.

Abstract

The "mental health crisis" has become the dominant framework for understanding student distress in US higher education. Drawing on interviews with 35 mental health professionals working with college students, this paper examines how practitioners themselves understand and critique this crisis narrative. Rather than accepting or rejecting the crisis framing wholesale, professionals articulated five distinct and often competing ways of understanding what is happening in college mental health: (1) a mental health crisis emphasizing increasing student psychopathology; (2) a developmental crisis attributing distress to disrupted adolescent development from technology use and changing parenting practices; (3) an access crisis focusing on overwhelmed institutional capacity; (4) a crisis of meaning highlighting the semantic instability of diagnostic language as it circulates in vernacular usage; and (5) a crisis of higher education locating the problem in structural conditions and achievement culture. Each framing renders certain aspects of the situation visible while obscuring others, authorizes particular forms of expertise, and implies fundamentally different interventions. Building on critical scholarship that treats "crisis" as a framing device that performs political work, this paper argues that the multiplication of crisis narratives represents both a symptom of conceptual complexity and practitioners' efforts to make visible what dominant framings obscure. Ultimately, professionals face the task of addressing patients' needs while dealing with multiple simultaneous pressures and working with a limited capacity to address upstream causes of distress.