Summary: A Comparative Study Of College Students With Mental Illnesses

Students at the University of Maryland are no different. While it isn’t known just how many Terps are facing a mental illness, it can be said that it may be more than anyone thinks. Resources such as the Counseling Center, Mental Health Services at the Health Center, and the Help Center exist to help students with mental illnesses or with any sort of personal struggle, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who needs those services actively reaches out for them. Efforts to reduce mental health stigma on campus are prevalent because of student activism groups such as Active Minds, but there’s always more to be done. While we know what the symptoms of mental illness are and we know the resources on campus to help those suffering, what we often

In his article “A Comparative Study of Campus Experiences of College Students With Mental Illnesses Versus a General College Sample,” Mark Salzer tackles essentially what I want my project to be about; in some ways, it compares the “normal” college experience to that of someone with a mental illness. It details an anonymous, online survey taken by more than 400 college students from across the country. With the information gathered from the survey, the article concludes that current college students with mental illness reported an overall better experience in college than former students claimed to have, but there is still work to be done in terms of campus resources, stigma elimination and classroom accommodations. I am considering mimicking Salzer’s survey method when reaching out to UMD students about their

Although I’m not sure at this point who those students will be, I plan on finding them through an online survey, and if that survey doesn’t garner the sources I would like, I might also follow up on students who have been featured in campus newspapers about their mental health struggle to see if they would also be willing to talk to me. One student who knows about my project has actually already approached me and said that he was willing to be interviewed. Ideally I’ll have some diversity in my interviewees, whether it’s different mental illness diagnoses or other varying identity factors, but I recognize that given the nature of this topic I may not be able to achieve as diverse of an interviewee pool as I would like if there is not a diverse group that is comfortable talking to me. On that note, it would be interesting to identify any commonalities between interviewees to see if they play a role in these students’ experiences in college with a mental illness. The overall purpose of the interviews will be to gain insight on their experiences at the University of Maryland with their mental illness. How did campus mental health resources help you succeed, if they helped at all? Did you experience any kind of stigma about your illness during your college years, and if so did that deter your recovery? I have a long list of questions I