Healthy Minds Study

Purpose
The purpose of Healthy Minds is to estimate the prevalance:

• Symptoms of depression, anxiety, and disordered eating using validated instruments
• Therapy/counseling and medication use for mental health

This year for the first time Healthy Minds is offering a module to assess alcohol and other substance use and student experience of the negative consequences that result. This new module will allow schools to examine the interaction between medication use and recreational substance use.

It also serves to explore:

• Factors that may facilitate or impede access to these services, such as stigma surrounding mental illness
• Relationships between mental health and other important aspects of well-being, including academic performance and substance use

Rationale
About one half of the nation's youths enroll in college¹, and most campuses have a rich array of resources to address student mental health. Students are typically at an important life stage for addressing mental health issues. In the United States, half of all lifetime cases of mental disorders begin by age 14 and three fourths by age 24²; the new social, economic and academic pressures of college may heighten the risks for students. Since many students become independent from their nuclear families during the college years, they are poised to take responsibility for and advocate their own mental health.

Mental health issues affect quality of life, and they have other material consequences. Mental health facilitates learning, development of skills, and healthy relationships while in college, and influences employment, productivity, relationships, and physical health later in life^5-8. Problems in mental health—particularly in the context of education—may therefore have far-reaching consequences for our society’s long-term productivity and well-being. Since mental health issues are especially common among economically disadvantaged students³, for example, they may play a role in disparities for graduation rates⁴.

Despite these potentially high returns on investments in mental health in college settings, however, little is known about mental disorders and mental health service use on college campuses. Healthy Minds works directly with participating institutions to provide school-specific data about the:

• Disease burden of depression, anxiety, substance use and other mental health issues
• Unmet need for mental health treatment
• Barriers to care
• Attitudes about mental health

We are especially interested in stigma; it is a potentially significant barrier to care, yet there is little empirical data about its effect on health outcomes.

HMS also explores trends at a national level, assessing relationships and patterns that may be extrapolated to inform broadly applicable, evidence-based guidelines for improving student mental health.