Dealing with Different
DESPITE ALL THE RECENT NEWS ON the subject, awareness about mental ill- ness on college campuses is relatively new: When Dean of First-Year Students Gail Zimmerman began studying for her Ph.D. in education almost a decade ago, psychiatric disorders were not considered disabilities. Motivated by the growing population of college students with mental illnesses, and interested in learning how universities treat them, Zimmerman undertook a national study that became her recently completed dissertation.
During the six years in which she wrote her dissertation, Zimmerman witnessed changes in the understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders, which now fall within the ambit of disability law.
Focusing on the four major categories of psychiatric disorders—mood, anxiety, and antisocial personality disorders and schizophrenia-Zimmerman realized these illnesses fell outside the radar of disability service providers. Students trying to cope with these challenging conditions do not benefit from the greater public awareness and acceptance granted those dealing with attention deficit disorder, learning disorders or physical handicaps. Also, the latter problems' tend to be diagnosed in grade school, giving those who suffer from them an understanding of the accommodations to which they are entitled.
Not so for the mentally ill: A student who approached health services for treatment a decade ago would not have been referred to disability services for accommodation. Now a referral is standard, preventing "what might end up being a crisis situation when ins too late for support and accommodations to be effective," says Zimmerman, perhaps alluding to the more than 1,000 suicides reported on campuses annually in recent years.
"College is a ripe environment for mental illness: The average age of onset for most psychiatric disorders is 18 to 25," she explains, "and changes in sleeping and eating patterns and stress can act as precipitating factors, so most young adults experience their first episode or diagnosis here." With decreased rates of institutionalization and increased use of better-quality psychotropic medicines, more individuals with mental illness are able to negotiate the stresses of an academic environment.
At Dartmouth, deans and mental health providers work hand-in-hand with a student disabilities coordinator, Nancy Pompian, to help students function maximally. "Long before this was a com- monly accepted population of students, Pompian was educating herself about stu- dents with psychiatric disabilities, and she has been persistent in educating others on campus as well," Zimmerman notes, adding that only 32 percent of campuses she surveyed have written guidelines for documenting psychiatric disabilities, something that Dartmouth long ago established."I would like to say, as an objective researcher, that Dartmouth has always been on the front end of disabilities service provision," Zimmerman says.
