The College Mental Health Crisis

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In today’s Daily, experts say more preventive care is urgently needed to address the mental health crisis among college students. And in other news, reporter Kat McGowan shares a series of profiles about family caregivers on NPR.

But first, tens of thousands of “Yakult Ladies” in navy suits take off on bikes and foot across Japan each weekday morning, delivering probiotic drinks and human connection to the country’s lonely.

In the globe’s most rapidly aging major economy – nearly 30% of Japan’s population is over 65 – family size is shrinking and multi-generational households are dwindling. Loneliness has become a primary concern, and, with their weekly in-person deliveries, the Yakult Ladies are helping address it.

“Knowing that someone will definitely come to see my face each week is a tremendous comfort,” one elderly customer told the BBC. “Even on days when I feel unwell, hearing (the Yakult Lady) say, ‘How are you today?’ at my doorstep gives me strength.”

College students face a mental health crisis, experts say, because help only comes in a crisis

You’ll find licensed mental health providers on most two- and four-year college campuses across the country, but two new analyses find students nonetheless struggling with their mental wellbeing. One, published last year by UnitedHealthcare, looked at data from a small annual survey of college students, parents and graduates. It found that while college students’ overall self-reported mental health concerns fell from 2022 to 2024, rates of eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorder held steady.

A second, much larger study from Johns Hopkins University looked at data from more than 560,000 students and found alarming increases in mental health symptoms among students from 2007 to 2022. That data from the Healthy Minds Survey, looked at the presence and severity of mental health symptoms. It found that the average scores for suicidal ideation grew a whopping 154% over those 15 years, restlessness rose by 80% and trouble concentrating by more than 77%.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that increases were even steeper among women, minority students, and people experiencing financial troubles – all groups subject to additional stress or discrimination. Reporting on the studies, The Hill noted that the underlying dataset did have one small improvement – a modest drop in depression rates since their heights over the pandemic.

These studies only looked at the incidence of mental health trouble, not why college students seem to have much higher rates than the general populations. Pierluigi Mancini, the acting CEO of Mental Health America, says the data suggests an urgent need for a preventative – rather than a reactive – approach to mental health care across campuses.

“If we’re truly going to help college students, we need to be able to develop those prevention strategies, to be able to intervene,” he said. “We need to have people around them that can help them recognize that there is an issue and they have the ability to get ahead of it.”

In other words, it’s time to stop waiting for students to reach a breaking point, and start building systems that can catch them before they do. “We’re still treating mental health as a service, instead of making it a campus-wide strategy,” Mancini added. “We need to invest in prevention and peer support.”

See also our story College Employment Scams Undermine Student Mental Health and another from a few years back, Young Advocates Take the Lead to Curb Campus Suicide.

“I was the end of the line”: the invisible world of family caregiving

Karla Rodriguez, 41, is one among roughly 63 million unpaid family caregivers in the United States. Were they paid for the services they provide voluntarily, their work would cost something like $600 billion per year – “more than all out-of-pocket spending on healthcare for everyone in the country,” Kat McGowan reported for NPR.

Despite broad bipartisan support for policy intervention to offer caregivers relief, there is currently no federal assistance, and only a handful of states offer small tax credits or paid leave to caregivers, leaving most of them to manage on their own. As such, depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation are common among them – a reflection of the tangible costs carried by the people who make up an invisible, dedicated system of care.

As is the case for many caregivers, the role fell into Rodriguez’s lap in 2023. In her case, it came after her father took ill and an emergency department called her to see him. Their historically strained relationship meant that choosing to care for her father wasn’t easy – when she first arrived at his bedside, they didn’t even recognize each other – but it’s a choice she’s come to embrace.

“I think I knew that I was the end of the line,” said Rodriguez, whose father has diabetes, HIV, and alcoholism. “If I hadn’t stepped up, he would be dead, and he would’ve been dead quickly. And I just could not, in good conscience, have that on my hands.”

Perhaps unexpectedly, the time they’ve shared has enabled her to understand how his trauma shaped him, helping her to forgive him for his inconsistent presence as a parent. “Oddly enough, I would say our relationship is better now than it’s been in years. And I never thought that my children would have a memory of him, and they actually look forward to seeing him now,” Rodriguez said.

She balances her caring responsibility with her job and her own parenting, but is always “on-call” – to convince him to go to dialysis, to handle issues with his bills, or to get something he urgently needs. It means she can never truly switch off, and yet it’s something she’s on her own with. “This is all pulling away time with my own children and my work.” Rodriguez said. “None of it stops. It’s all still there. And I think that’s something that caregivers constantly struggle with, which is, am I giving enough of myself to everyone who needs the care?”

Find more of McGowan’s caregiving stories on NPR, including this one: “Caregiving can test you, body and soul. It can also unlock a new sense of self.”

See also: MindSite News’ “Caregiving Expands Who You Are” and The Power and the Tool of Caregiving.

In other news….

Tirachard Kumtanom/Shutterstock. Online gambling may seem like great fun until it wipes out someone’s bank account.

ICYMI: MindSite News highlighted a new report from the Kindbridge Research Institute in partnership with UCLA, which looked at the harms of online gambling – and why it is now easier for young people to gamble than ever before. The explosion in digital gambling is undermining both their finances and mental health. Read the report and our exclusive interview here.