Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be….dorm counselors
Reading about the tragic suicides of six Cornell students this academic year, and today’s suicide of a Yale student who jumped off the Empire State building, I am having a bad flashback to my college years.
You see, as a naive first-year student entering Brown University in the fall of 1986, I pictured a rosy and optimistic future with my college classmates. Just one year later I was one of the resident counselors “in charge” of the well-being of about 40 students on our dorm floor. When I started college, I had never known anyone with a major psychiatric illness. And little did I know how many serious problems would present themselves for the first time during the freshman year. Major depression. Manic depression. Relationship violence. Drug use. Pervasive eating disorders, some of them very serious. Suicide.
Looking back, it seems crazy to put 20- and 19-year olds in such a position of responsibility relative to their peers. In other words, having the juniors and sophomores serve as the first-line responders to serious problems in the freshman class seems utterly crazy.
Brown provided what seemed at the time like extensive training for us, with several full days at the beginning of the year, and ongoing support, but the whole college mental health system had a serious weakness: it was nearly impossible to force a student who was in crisis to actually go in for professional counseling, which the university did offer. This led to intensely disturbing situations as a peer counselor. My junior year I was a Head Counselor assigned to the large wing of a dorm, about 40 first-year students on four floors, and three other resident counselors. One of our students was clearly bipolar and she was getting treatment. However, despite everyone’s best efforts to help her, when she returned to campus the following fall, she committed suicide. After that, one of her friends came to me (even though I was no longer officially her peer counselor) and repeatedly told me she was thinking of killing herself. I tried to get her to go to Psych Services but nobody could compel her to go. So in the meantime she had me extremely worried about her well-being and utterly powerless to do anything about it other than tell my supervisors I thought we had an emergency on our hands.
I saw other things that were out of my control, and well beyond my ability to handle: two former best friends getting into a violent late-night fight over a woman, leading one to get his hand slammed in a door; students who had to leave school to get treatment for eating disorders; a “what did I just see?” moment when I wondered whether a fellow counselor had a bag of cocaine in his room. (To this day I am still not sure what was going on with that one. At the time I was incredulous to the point of being unable to know how to analyze what I was seeing or how to follow up on it.)
I don’t know how to reform the college mental health system. I do believe that parents need to be vigilant about checking in with their students and seeing how they are doing over vacation. Dr. Michele Borba has written eloquently about this issue, giving parents the reality check about the fact that not only is 1 in 4 students dropping out in the first year, but also that that depression, stress, and drop-outs peak during the second half of the first year.
In most of my writing I try to be supportive of a whole variety of life paths, career paths, parenting styles, and opportunities to help one another, but I have no evidence to suggest that the peer counseling system in colleges today is on any stronger ground. So if one day my daughter asked me whether I thought she should become a dorm counselor, I would have one strong word of advice for her: Don’t.
