Anxious, Depressed, and Suicidal: Crisis Narratives in University Student Mental Health and the Need for a Balanced Approach to Student Wellness

Abstract

There is growing global awareness of the poor mental health of university students, as well as the need to improve students’ access to services and expand the range of available evidence-based interventions. However, a crisis narrative is emerging, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that runs the risk of positioning all students as potential patients in need of formal psychiatric interventions. Our aim in this commentary is to critically present the evidence that supports increased attention to student mental health, while also raising a concern that the crisis narrative may itself have unintended harmful consequences. We highlight some of the potential dangers of overtly medicalizing and thus pathologizing students’ experiences of everyday distress, inadequacies of formal diagnostic categories, limitations of focusing narrowly on psychotherapeutic and psychiatric interventions, and the short-sightedness of downplaying key social determinants of students’ distress. We argue for an integrative and balanced public health approach that draws on the rigor of psychiatric epidemiology and the advances that have been made to identify evidence-based interventions for students, while simultaneously being mindful of the shortcomings and potential dangers of working narrowly within the paradigm of diagnostic labels and psychotherapeutic interventions.