Description:

Dr. Eugene Raikhel of the University of Chicago will be the first guest lecturer of the 2024-2025 lecture series.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, a language of crisis pervaded the world of college student mental health, with help-seeking, diagnoses, and other indicators increasing steadily for at least a decade in North America. However, a closer and more critical perspective finds widely diverging views about the sources or even the nature of this crisis. This paper draws on a preliminary set of interviews with US mental health professionals working with college students to examine their interpretations of the college mental health crisis. Raikhel suggest that as more students actively take up and identify with diagnostic categories, mental health professionals and administrators in colleges find themselves facing a new dilemma: how to give access to care and accommodate for people with impairments when a much broader part of the population claims a need for care. Raikhel argues that while these “looping effects” are amplified in the space of higher education, they also echo much broader developments related to mental health care throughout the US.