Google searches of suicides by college get very depressing, very fast.
There is a great deal of hand-wringing about the youth mental health crisis, especially on college campuses, but nothing meaningful is being done to alleviate it.
Why is that? Why can’t the brilliant minds at our institutions of higher education figure out a solution?
I’ve found the answer.
Cover-Up Culture creates a toxic environment where leadership consistently cares more about maintaining power than they do about the dignity and safety of their students and staff. Blame, shame, and humiliation are used to control. Secrecy and lack of transparency keep everyone on edge. Fear prevents victims and their allies from speaking up with concerns. Complacency takes the place of compassion. Mistrust and uncertainty run rampant. Burnout is inevitable.
Parents, students, and faculty who express concerns are being silenced to protect an image that has never reflected reality. The shiny object that is an Ivy League diploma loses its luster when you pull back the curtain.
Those of us who dare to speak up are consistently ignored, and then we are silenced. Students, staff, and faculty don’t dare risk their educations or jobs, parents fear stigmatizing their children, and the toxic cycle of abuse continues.
As a psychiatric nurse with expertise in adolescents and young-adults, a former psychiatric patient myself, and the mom of a college junior at a prestigious school, I hold multiple perspectives on the current mental heath crisis that is devastating my daughter’s generation.
During a family crisis last spring and summer, I became concerned about J’s worsening mental health while on campus at Dartmouth College. Despite seeing a campus counselor for a few months, she was demonstrating clear signs of increasing anxiety and depression. I heard many stories of other students who were also struggling. I started paying more attention to the campus paper and other news about the school.
The more I learned, the more I alarmed I became. The rates of suicides, sexual assaults, and hazing incidents appear to be higher at Dartmouth than at all the other Ivy League schools, and rates at the other Ivies are consistently worse than at most big state schools.
Why? I wanted answers.
When my phone calls to student health services were ignored, I visited campus and tried to address my concerns directly with their mental health team and campus security. I was entirely disillusioned by the lack of concern and respect demonstrated by the staff I spoke with. I had no choice but to dig deeper into the problems on campus.
I was able to connect with other concerned parents, students, and staff, and we started sharing information privately with each other. A concerning pattern of denial, deflection, and dismissal became obvious. The power held by the Greek system and their alumni appears to be a major factor in the toxicity.
I sent an email to the incoming president at Dartmouth requesting a meeting with leaderhip. I had high hopes that the institution’s first female president would be receptive to my concerns. She was not.
This is an edited version of a message I wrote in July:
Dear President-elect Beilock -
I hope you and your family are well. My daughter is a sophomore at Dartmouth. Our family is not well. We trusted Dartmouth to educate and protect her, but after two years on campus, she is demonstrating less confidence and greater cognitive dissonance (disconnect between values and behaviors).
My family is in the midst of trauma which is driving us apart instead of bringing us together. We are in crisis.
J is my pride and joy. She knows that I would never, ever do anything to harm her, and yet she tells me she doesn’t trust me. She has shut down and cut me off.
As a trauma expert, I know that shut-down (disengagement) is a trauma response. I have seen it often in both professional and personal settings. It is very painful for everyone involved.
I don’t know if you can imagine the pain of being on the receiving end of disengagement by your own child. It’s excruciating to see them suffer and have them push you away when you try to connect. Disengagement is not “normal”, and it’s not healthy for anyone.
Dysregulation dissociation (mania) can be scary for parents to witness, but disengagement dissociation (shut-down) is actually far more dangerous. Suicides occur when someone who is disengaged bypasses co-regulation and dissociates themselves out of existence either intentionally or by mistake (by engaging in high-risk behaviors).
Dartmouth reinforces disengagement (shut-down) by preventing students from accessing safe spaces to dysregulate when they are stressed-out. Without safe spaces for co-regulation, most students learn to put up barriers to connection instead of establishing boundaries for protection. Chronically dissociated college students get trapped in cognitive dissonance and learn not to trust anyone. They are hurting in huge numbers, but the wounded leaders are incapable of providing safe spaces while trapped in their own haze of confusion.
Last week I reached out to student health services with my concerns and visited their offices on campus. SHS redirected me to your office, which was empty. A security officer at your empty office redirected me back across campus to the building that I’d just left to meet with two lieutenants in charge of campus security. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a true emergency.
My daughter and I then met in person with an on-call campus therapist, which only served to increase the gulf between us. I ended the session after 20 minutes when it became obvious that the friendly, but ill-equipped, counselor knew nothing about rupture-and-repair, attachment theory, or developmental trauma. J and I both left the session in deep grief, suffering separately instead of healing together.
It should not be this difficult for a parent to get help for their child. I was actually on campus and it was impossible to feel heard. It’s no wonder parents worry when their kids, who are hundreds of miles away for the first time in their lives, aren’t communicating with them on a regular basis. Where are the adults in the room? Who is in charge? Where can our kids turn for support?
Campus crisis response systems are woefully inadequate. Student, faculty, and staff wellbeing should be any institutions #1 priority, but that’s clearly not the case at Dartmouth.
I have spoken with many students and several parents. I know I am not alone in my concerns. Institutions of higher education need to wake up to reality.
As soon as there is safety from retaliation, I guarantee you that the complaints will come flooding in. Leadership needs to get ahead of the game if you truly want to stop the destruction of these young lives.
I look forward to hearing from you.
With kindness,
Tara Lee, RN, BSN, MOM
As a result of this letter I was granted a 30-minute video-meeting with two deans and the Assistant Vice President for Equity and Compliance and Title IX Coordinator. It was a frustrating 30 minutes of patronizing double-speak during which the assistant VP rolled her eyes at me when I brought up the subject of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The lack of respect and empathy demonstrated by a supposed expert in Title IX compliance made me lose all faith in Dartmouth’s ability to change the toxic, entitled, patriarchal climate that pervades the Ivory Tower of Higher Learning.
Dartmouth is clearly paying lip service to Title IX and DEI measures. The culture there is as toxic as ever, and they are doing nothing to change it.
It’s now been three months since that disastrous meeting. President Beilock was inaugurated with a great deal of fanfare in September. Dartmouth and an expert panel of surgeon generals offered many big promises regarding improvements in mental health services — but they are all empty.
Clearly nothing has changed in Hanover.
The only way to meaningful change in any organization is to listen to the critics and the victims and to take responsibility for wrongs, but Dartmouth won’t do that. Facing the truth risks upsetting the money stream from the alumni who created the toxic climate in the first place. Money trumps safety every single time.
Given the dismal mental health reports coming out of most institutions of higher education, it’s clear that Dartmouth is not the only school with a toxic atmosphere of shame and silence. How many more students will we lose to suicide and debilitating mental health struggles before we say enough is enough?
At this point, if a student drops out (or kills themselves) due to mental health issues caused by the abuse, there is a steady stream of naive applicants ready to take their place. Families shell out close a half-million dollars for the “privilege” of an Ivy League diploma. What a waste. Those same graduates go on to perpetuate the broken systems throughout society, bullying their way to the top or forced to do the bidding of the bullies. Nothing will change unless we start speaking up and hold everyone accountable, every time.
If only my family had known the truth three years ago when J was applying to college, Dartmouth would never have made the long list, much less the short one. I have no doubt that she would have fared much better at a big state university with a more experientially diverse student population. Live and learn, but at what cost?
My intention now is to minimize the damage over the next two years and start a movement for meaningful change going forward. I want her college diploma to bring her pride and empowerment, not a ticket into a cult of privilege.
