A Lecture on the Pace That Kills at College

“Can College Kill Your Child?”--that was the provocative question that had lured this group of concerned parents of high school students to a Tuesday evening lecture at Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue in Encino.

The speaker, Dr. Vincent D’Andrea, director of student counseling and psychological services at Stanford University, had just told them the importance of checking out a college or university’s “human support systems” as well as the number of its Nobel laureates and the scope of its academic curriculum.

He had spoken of the pressures--parental pressures to achieve, high self-expectations, loneliness and isolation away from home--that may lead college students to become suicidal. He recited the statistics: a suicide rate of 15 per 100,000 among 15- to 24-year-olds in school.

The lecture, fortunately, was not quite as provocative as its billing. D’Andrea had not come armed with alarming new facts and figures indicating that severe mental disturbance is rampant among today’s college students. To the contrary, his news was that the adolescent suicide rate has leveled off since the mid-70s and is continuing to decline.

Still, it became apparent during the question-and-answer session that followed that many in this group of white upper-middle-class Valley parents feel a general uneasiness about their children and how they are being affected by their families’ preoccupation with success.

It is a concern that was best pinpointed on this particular occasion by Rabbi Steven Jacobs of The New Reform Congregation, which co-sponsored the evening:

“Before children are born, in utero, they’re already registered in certain schools . . . that is madness.”

As the evening got under way, Michael Hirsh, an independent producer, showed clips from his 1978 film for PBS, “College Can Be Killing.” On screen, a Northwestern University undergraduate who had attempted suicide, and failed, was talking about expectations and guilt, about his parents’ constant reminders: “We give all this up to put you through school . . . you better be getting A’s or else we’re wasting our money.”

He mentioned, too, that he lay in his dorm bed for two days after overdosing but “no one came looking for me.”

The latter point was addressed by D’Andrea, the former chief psychiatrist for the Peace Corps and, in 1970, co-founder of The Bridge, Stanford’s peer counseling center. “We (in the American College Health Assn.) believe,” he said, “that human support services are as important as the academic.”

‘Is It a Fun Place?’

(Earlier, in informal discussion, D’Andrea suggested that parents of a prospective student find out about an institution: “What happens after dinner? Is it OK to walk around at night? Is it a fun place?” And, he said, a safe environment means to him both physical safety and a spirit of looking out for one another. In a residence, for example, he said, there needs to be “a consensus model about alcohol in the house, drugs in the house, rowdy behavior, about sexism, racism . . . ethical values are terribly important. If they can’t be part of education, what good is it?”)

“One does a lot of learning and a lot of living” in college, D’Andrea said, and one of the most important things to be learned is “how to develop relationships,” both with members of one’s own sex and the opposite sex. Those who do not make connections, he said, are the ones he worries most about.

“The percentage of disturbed adolescents (20%) is roughly the same as the number of disturbed adolescents in college (on entry),” D’Andrea said. Among both populations, he said, “Only 5 or 6% actually seek help,” which means that 14% “go on to college with some significant problem.”

He added, “Almost routinely at Stanford one student in the entering class is going to experience a breakdown within the first four or five days.” This, he said, will typically be a student who came to school “in not very good shape,” probably with the blessings of family who rationalized, “Well, it’ll be good for him or her to get away and there will be people there to take care of him. Kind of dumb.”

The reality, D’Andrea said, is that “colleges and universities are not therapeutic communities. They’re pressure cookers.”

At some point about 10-12% of American college students seek counseling, he said, “usually in a crisis,” and most need no further help. About a third will return for additional help during their four years.

Counseling, especially peer counseling, is vital, D’Andrea said, but equally important is that an institution live up to its responsibility “to foster a humanistic environment for people.” In a dormitory or residence hall, he said, that means ideally at least one R.A. (residential adviser) for each 50 students; it means a code of conduct governing such mundane matters as how loud one’s stereo may be played; it means workshops on student health issues.

“Lately,” he said, “we’ve been doing discussion groups around the issues of AIDS and what is safe in sexual practice.” How, he asked, do young people deal with what they’re hearing--that “in a sense, sex is death”?

D’Andrea advocates inasmuch as possible using students as advisers, observing, “Most faculty make terrible advisers (and at large universities) they’re not interested in undergraduates to begin with. In investigating an institution, he said, ask, “Do they have peer contraceptive advisers?” Are there peer-run drop-in centers? What training do the peers have?

When looking at a college or university, he suggested, “You want to superimpose on it a kind of safety net of services” easily available to students.

The meeting was opened to questions from the audience. The first was, “What should parents of children in college look for as signs of undue stress?”

D’Andrea said, “Generally, what you look for is change in behavior . . . when people are not themselves.” He added, “Contrary to popular belief, most students call home at least once a week,” which makes it possible to observe these changes. And, he noted, when a student is in real trouble, that student is going to seek help from the family.

Another questioner asked, “What are some of the most obvious indications (of trouble) in a pre-college student facing possible rejection or a heavy workload?”

Again, he said, the clue is behavior change: “Optimism becomes pessimism. Recurring insomnia. Changes in appetite. Weight loss. Minor illnesses.”

Grappling With Disappointment

At this point in the college application process, he said, “the issue that all students grapple with is disappointment. There’s a lot riding on getting into the right school, or so it seems. It think it’s important for us to look at our own expectations about that.”

D’Andrea, who has four children, observed that each of them had experienced stress “and the worst was in the one who went to private school . . . it’s easier to be a college student these days, in my opinion, than to be a high school student in a high-performance school.”

A parent wanted to know--if stress symptoms appear in a student, does it make sense to “give them a little room to ramble around in?”

“I think a lot of students are better off if they take a year off between high school and college,” D’Andrea said, and half of all college students do so during their four years. “At some point it catches up,” he said, “usually around junior year. They’ll say, ‘I’m just burned out.’ ”

Perhaps, someone said, there should be more effective support services for students in high school? “I don’t think it’s highly realistic,” D’Andrea said. But, he added, he would encourage “student to student help,” which he considers more powerful and more cost-effective “than a bunch of grown people running around trying to develop relationships with a bunch of young people who are trying to un-develop their relationships with grownups.”

Perhaps, D’Andrea said, the skills and energies of parents could somehow be utilized by high schools to provide things school districts cannot such as “in-depth discussions of family life, the history of the family, how come families are important . . . the whole issue of relationships” through seminars and group meetings.

A young woman asked what efforts are being made by non-residential colleges to provide human services, suggesting, “A kid who’s really depressed in an apartment, there’s no R.A. who’d ever know.” The reality, said D’Andrea, is “that’s right.”

A parent asked, how does one know if a child falls into that statistical group of college students who are disturbed? If he is, what should be done? By definition, D’Andrea said, a significant emotional disorder is a clinical condition which, if not treated, would worsen. These include phobias, depression, alcoholism and severe drug abuse. He added, “You have to make a distinction between disorders and just the problems of living. Lots of time the problems of living are not treatable. You have to just work your way through them.”

One problem, he said, is that many people with problems will compensate well in the security of the home but “begin to decompensate” under the dual stresses of being away from home and academic pressures.

Rabbi Jacobs spoke: “Obviously, by the nature of this turnout, we have many, many concerns . . . I think a lot of us are scared,” questioning long-held values, education primary among these in the Jewish community, worried about the rising incidence of drug use, juvenile suicide, juvenile crime.

“I think our successes provide a very difficult obstacle in many ways for our kids,” said D’Andrea, adding, “(they) expect in almost a magical way to know things without learning them,” and with no pain in their lives.

He added, “Along the way we’ve been real busy,” ignoring the subtleties that provide children with a sense of security and self-esteem, “a haven.” He told the joke about the priest, the minister and the rabbi describing the moment when life begins: For the priest, it is conception; for the minister, it is birth. But for the rabbi it is “when the dog dies and the last kid goes off to school.” Then he said, “The truth of the matter is that’s when life gets really tough.”

A middle-aged woman in the audience said, “I’m guilty. I’m guilty by putting pressure on my kids to produce and I’m guilty because I’m a single mother who reentered the world of business and was asked by everyone I interviewed with, ‘What’s your master’s in, ma’am?’ It’s tough for a 40-year-old woman and it’s going to be tougher for them (her children). They have to excel. They have to do well on their SATs or Stanford won’t even talk to them. There’s so much pressure on those stinking SATs. . . .”

There was this optimistic note from D’Andrea: “Young people are amazingly tolerant of some of the foolish things we say or do.”

But the good news he had brought about the declining adolescent suicide rate was something of a mixed message, as he explained later. It goes hand in hand with the rise of so-called character disorders,such as narcissistic personality, immaturity and sense of grandiose self-importance.

D’Andrea said, “It seems as though we went through a period of time when neuroses seemed to be the way in which conflicts were being expressed” and psychoanalysis is very effective in dealing with neuroses. Then, he said, “Character disorders began to appear and they’re much more difficult to deal with.”

Among today’s college population, he said, difficulties are being much less often expressed in depression, eating neuroses and “impulsive suicidal behavior. Character disorder is rarely suicidal. They’re more apt to lie, more apt to cheat, more apt to gloss things over, to be unethical, self-serving.

“Severe character disorders have less of a sense of responsibility and experience less of the guilt which often feeds suicidal thinking. They’re more apt to try to manipulate somebody or change something--or to hurt somebody.”

Suicide remains the second cause of death among college students, after accidents. But, D’Andrea emphasized, “For most people going to college is a very, very positive experience.”