What’s Going on Around Here?: Applying a Developmental Perspective to the Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education

Responding to the call for papers on "The Future of College Student Mental Health," we analyze the current "crisis" in college student mental health, and we discuss how it is co-constructed by our students and we who are the faculty and the administrators. We identify three factors: 1) A shift from offering value-based education, toward promoting transformative experience, 2) ambivalence around recognizing systematic and structural factors contributing to suffering, and 3) anxiety about the use of "authority." We consider in detail our understanding of these factors as well as how our existential-relational model of development can help make sense of the complex phenomena facing our students and our field to make suggestions for how counseling centers can respond to student needs in the future.