Limited resources, complicated laws and higher demand for counseling means some slip through cracks
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comColleges struggle to cope with troubled students
Seeded on Mon Jan 17, 2011 11:27 AM EST (msnbc.com)
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Well, I guess so ... The college presidents of today are the same ones who attended and organized every radical, anti-government, pro-communism march and revolt during the 60's, Vietnam, and who supported the likes of Bill Ayers and Castro. So, yes, they are conflicted and are getting a sense of just how senseless they were so many years ago as they were letting the pot and lsd control their actions and perceptions
Get out of Texas much?
Bottom Line: Preventive measures are great. Emergency plans are great. Preparation is great. However, no plan is foolproof, and no place is totally, completely, 100% safe.
People are unpredictable and always will be. Stay alert and tell the people in your life that you love them today because tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone.
FORCED MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT???????!!!!!!!!!!!! Good God. After my HORRIBLE psychiatric experience, I'd start running as soon as I caught a whiff of any kinds of plans to drug me again.
Students: There are questions that your schools should never ask. Do not let them but into your emotional life, do not let them drag you to a psych ward, do not let them put you on drugs.
1 in 4 students on psych meds? That's ridiculous. I wonder how many students are on those meds by THEIR choice. We've become a nation of drugged up zombies. I hope some students have the smarts to stay away from the kind of people who will ask, "How've you been feeling?", or "I'm worried, is everything okay?"(jots notes on subject), because that's just code for, is this person a crazy?
I ask those questions every day because that's what I do...I'm a psychologist. And I never ask them to force someone into a hospital or get them on psychotropics. But I do know that I've saved at least a couple of lives and helped many people (yes, allot of college students too) to make their college experience better and more productive. Depressions, anxiety, eating disorders, are all endemic in the college setting. If you have someone on hand that the kids know they can trust with their confidentiality, then they will come in and see you. And, that's where the help begins. And it's all about allowing them to lower their guard, letting you into their emotional lives and helping to provide clear, reasonable and the least intrusive interventions.
That's what I'm talking about. As long as they don't feel forced into a decision, that's fine. I don't mean to bash psychology. The students should choose to get help on their own terms, not the schools. I think you and I are on the same page. But me, I just have trouble letting my guard down like that because of a traumatic experience, so my radar is always on overdrive with psychologists, and psychiatrists.
isis-1618599 Thank you for your post. You make some very good points.
There are a few groups in America that I can support with a gift.
One is Focus Adolescent Services. They are our nations largest group helping parents and professional with "troubled teens."
One can glean, from their web site, that far too many children are misdiagnosed and way too many are on drugs that are contraindicated. or unnecessary.
There are, I am sure, children who should never be allowed to leave home. I wonder if their parents are just happy to finally get the child out of the house. They see college as a good alternative, when it is not.
The "troubled teen" industry is so dangerous. Have you ever heard of troubled teen boot camp, or behavior modification camp? Some lazy parents send their kids to these camps. Some even go so far as to arrange to have their kids kidnapped by the camp officials in the middle of the night. Kids are abused, neglected, brainwashed, drugged, some even die in these places. Phone calls are monitored, so the kids can't inform their parents of what is going on, mail is opened and read before given to the kids. Sometimes the kids are put in restraints, or staff members use physical/deadly force to restrain them. In group "therapy" anything they say is twisted around to guilt them, and they try to get them to confess about "what they did".
Parents: Don't fall for the troubled teen hype, your kid could end up abused or dead. And if they survive these places, many end up with PTSD, nightmares, flashbacks, and more often than not they don't go away.
No I have never been to one of these camps, but I do know what happens in them. The psychiatric industry probably has a lot to do with it, since kids are drugged in those places. Anyway, don't resort to STRANGERS for help. If any of you want more info, go to the Coalition Against Institutionalized Child Abuse website. They have many stories.
It is only natural when the school costs way too much and when graduates are not able to find any jobs once they graduate. An entire generation is being thrown away due to the greed and lack of foresight of the boomers, thanks guys.
A few years ago (2 years after Virginia Tech), one of my classmates filed a restraining order against another classmate. The judge apparently felt the evidence for the restraining order was serious to expand the standard distance by three times.
In the wake of this, our department counselor began asking other students if they had ever experienced disturbing behavior from this student, particularly of the sexist type. Many had. Soon after she began this inquiry, though, the State Attorney General told her to stop because she could put the university at risk of of a libel lawsuit. The inquiry stopped and no action was taken against the student despite the fact that many students and their parents expressed concerns.
The way my college handled this was cowardly and disappointing, and I've never completely forgiven them. They allowed this student to return to class and fought my group when we sought to have him removed from a project he had not been contributing to but during which we were forced to work very closely with him. It was particularly infurating because not long before (in fact a week before VT) a professor had been killed, on campus, by an ex she had a restraining order against.
If fear of a libel lawsuit is enough to stop an inquiry against a potentially violent or at least disruptive student, why wasn't fear of violence on campus just as compelling? It was a failure on every level: school, county, state and public.
That's outrageous. It sounds though that at least the court, if not the school itself, was willing to take action. it's a shame that the school didn't stand up to the AG, because the AG has no authority to 'order' the school to back down from a protective order.
It sounds to me like this nut job has been on the radar of a lot of people in Tuscon for some time. So where were all those caring people then? Now that people have been hurt they seem to come out of the woodwork. There is no way this shooting should have happened in the first place if people with any common sense would have looked into this persons mental health!The problem is that the people of this country only care about themselves until it's to late then they act like they really care about others after the fact !
In our present age, where science and medicine as religion, and the physician and psychiatrist (and lesser mental health professionals) as its clergy, it is little wonder that such seemingly senseless violence comes to to be couched in the reductive language of mental illness. The latter is no less than a thoroughgoing transformation of moral values into health values, and where instutitional psychiatry has managed to insinuate its presence as our culture's social engineer. In essence, the psychiatric enterprise, with its acolytes in tow, has seen fit to alter the individual (brain) so as to alter the social, with dire consequences to the rule of law and civil liberties.
Will justice be rendered? Will any sense be made of isolated acts of wanton violence, by the medicalizing of the moral? I very much doubt that the medical-psychiatric complex will furnish any solution. We live in an age where the individual need no longer be accountable, and where individual freedom, and the responsibility such entails, have been shorn, one from the other.
This is not a matter for medical science, to divine the motives of such an act, but no matter. And there is no medical "treatment" for such a monstrous act; there is only coming to terms with the depths of human depravity. And psychiatry is ill suited to address the moral dimension of the latter. Such are the limits of science and medicine in matters of human (mis)conduct.
When we as a "community" address ourselves as the epitomy of coping skills for everyone else...the individual fails when they lose the introspect of personal maturity....what an empty world. deuteronomy 8:2
If you can find a humanistic mental health professional that uses -Limited Drug Therapy- and has -Empathy- you are half way their to getting needed help? The vast majority of mental health professionals are nothing more than inhuman bureaucrats that use their position to make life a -Living Hell- for human beings with mental disorders? The true rate of real recovery is one in a thousand mental health clients and a suicide rate of over ninety percent of mental health clients? So think twice before you get involved with the mental health industry? Now you are wondering how I arrived at these high numbers of -Failures- by the mental health industry? Observations over the years while I was working for one of the top mental heath rehabilitation facilities in N.J. and years of trying to get the mental health industry across the U.S.A. interested in creating a proven time tested method of of -Helping- clients and their -Caregivers-? This atmosphere of kindness that we created stopped all kinds of suicides for the last two years before I retired? I have come to realize that the mental health industry is one big ponzi scheme that offers a lifetime of pain and suffering and suicide. so please think twice before you get involved with the mental health industry?
I know the gist of this article was more concerned with how universities are going to handle situations involving mentally disturbed students, but I couldn't help but be disturbed by the stat that 25% of students are on psychiatric drugs! I graduated in 2003, and I don't remember these drugs being prevalent at all.
What is going on in society that these students are taking these drugs? What does that say about our society? Are psychologists making better diagnoses or are they over-diagnosing? Just because someone is unhappy with their grades, or boy/girlfriend (or lack thereof) doesn't mean they need to be prescribed drugs! Are we all going to resort to pill-popping to cure our unhappiness, instead of doing some soul-searching to get to the cause?
Shouldn't psychologists/psychiatrists start looking internally at themselves to recognize this problem and start to limit the usage? Don't they owe it to society that we don't become a nation of pill-poppers? There are no quick fixes and popping a pill will not solve anything in your life that is making you unhappy.