How to Prepare High School Students for the Transition to College
How to Identify High School Seniors who are Likely to have Problems Coping in College, and then Give them the Tools they Need to be Resilient.
Millenials and Generation Z ("iGen") are more talkative about mental health than any other generation, yet least likely to take what they're learning in therapy and apply it in times of adversity. We may show up for therapy once a week, or once a month. We get along swimmingly with our therapist, and we walk away with great solution-focused tactics that we role played in session. When we're smacked in the face by adversity though, we're nearly paralyzed. We're avoidant. We're in complete denial, and depending on the situation we might let it get so bad that we have to be rescued. Literally. Yes, I'm completely generalizing and catastrophizing. And at the same time, the elephant in the room is that there's a truth to what is being said.
The most common mental health diagnoses in older teens and young adults are anxiety and depression. No matter your professional role in working with young people, you most likely see this showing up very differently in different youth. To what can ee attribute these issues? Well, we can certainly make assumptions. Social media? Absolutely! Our brains are still developing and when we see other people doing what appears to be more adventurous and risk-taking behaviors, we naturally want to one-up them. Read: impulsive without thought to consequence. Or we judge ourselves for the lives we're living as being "less-than." Read: depressed. Or, we feel the stress and pressure to stay on track academically because all our peers are managing to get straight A's at another college and miraculously manage to party several nights a week as well. Read: anxiety, perfectionism, and substance abuse.
Aside from social media, you might see two pretty common presentations as well. One example being a young person who was outgoing and engaged and now suddenly withdrawn. Read: trauma. Or the young student whose parent has stepped in to every situation to help ease any barriers they may experience. This could include reading a college essay where your gut tells you the parents wrote it. Or the parent who has been in touch with you numerous times asking for clarification or whatever it is you do with the adolescent (Math Teacher, Coach, etc.) and wanting to also pass judgment and express concerns constantly. Read: "Snow Plow Parenting."
You know what I don't love about absolutes or assumptions? Well, for "assumptions" it makes an "ASS out of U and ME." So catchy, and yet so true. Not every Millenial or iGen person is experiencing these problems, and without watering down some of these issues, they are more common than not. That's nearly an absolute.
A school counselor, teacher, or coach, who may see high school senior students exhibiting these problems, are in the best position to help these soon-to-be-adults acquire the skills they need to be successful during their college transition. Now what's super important for me to highlight right now is that success is subjective. No one is perfect. We often stumble and fall, and that's how we learn and grow. If we are left alone to our own devices (literally), we may be on the fast track to a blow-out. And no, I'm not referencing a diaper.
Here are some thoughts on the "tools" for the toolbox and indicators of whether or not a high school student will be able stand on their own two feet when they get to college:
Communication: What is the communication at home like? How often are these students communicating with their parents? Are they over-communicating to the point that it appears they are dependent? And same goes for the parent. Are you noticing that the parent is overly involved in knowing everything that’s happening with their child? The same goes for asking for help. Has the student ever had to ask for assistance with anything? Colleges are set up with an abundant of resources for students. The catch? They have to ask for it and/or show up to receive it. Most students don’t know how to ask for help, let alone brainstorm who they need to be connected to in order to eliminate their discomforts.
Academic Engagement: How did they show up in high school? Did they skip a lot of school and still manage to get passing grades? If they are skipping class, where are they? A big part of college is not showing up to class, but doing the work outside of class. Are they going to college with a rigid plan for their major? Nearly 50% of college students change their major at least once. If we collectively know a student's strength is not math and yet we're encouraging them to be an Engineering major, we may be setting them up for failure. Not to mention, what do we think about the quality of their work? Do they have the ability to take constructive feedback regarding their work and then adapt and change to meet the rigorous requirements of higher education? Additionally, if a student as an IEP in high school it's imperative we encourage them to get connected to the Disability Services office. I can't tell you the number of college freshmen I worked with who refused to get the accommodations they needed. Just because you go to college doesn't mean that a student's disabilities, however significant, will magically disappear. Let's help set them up for success from Day 1!
Social Engagement: Let's look at their friend groups in high school. Did they have friends? If they were connected to negative friend groups, what was their ability to break it off? Or the reason to be connected in the first place? Were they involved with interest groups, in and out of school? Have they ever moved from one new town/school to another and be forced to establish new friends? High School friends groups will dissipate when August rolls around. Everyone will be in different places and meeting new friends. The question becomes, does the now young adult know how to make new friends?
Emotional Wellness: If a student had a mental health diagnosis in middle school, they will want to continue getting the help they need in college. Students often wait until they're in crisis to see a counselor on campus and at that point, the wait time for an appointment may be upwards of three weeks. My recommendation: set up your appointment early. Be proactive, rather than reactive. If you know of a student who has experienced significant trauma prior to high school graduation (i.e. death in family, sexual assault, etc.) you'll want to encourage that young person to look for a counselor off-campus. Help them get the therapeutic resources put in place before they even step foot on campus! Typically there are two ways to think about maladaptive behaviors in high school or college students. The first is "outward" or externalizing behaviors such as aggression, hard partying, high-risk sexual activity, and substance abuse. These are all very obvious and noticeable. The second is "inward," or internalizing behaviors such as social isolation, substance use, self-harm, poor self-care, and suicidal tendencies. These are not always noticeable.
Physical Wellness: What are the student's sleeping, eating, and physical fitness habits? So many high school athletes go to college and don't do anything physical, and subsequently become depressed. Or a student is addicted to social media and finds his sleep schedule reversed and now lives a nearly nocturnal life. We talk about gut health and its connection to the brain, but that won't stop a student from eating junk food. Especially if they are not familiar with how to cook, let along meal prep and menu planning.
I can't speak highly enough of Dr. Marcia Morris' book The Campus Cure as a resource for parents whose children are launching into higher education. She speaks to the problems, pressures, and crisis young adults are facing and how families can provide support from a distance. The seemingly simple concepts are not as easy to implement in the heat of the moment though! It's best for families to read this book before their child goes off to college. That way you can be proactively prepared in knowing how to show up and support your child during their struggles. It's not an if, but rather a when.
At the end of the day, we collectively cannot point fingers at one single professional and say that it was "their fault" the young person was not successful in their transition to college. We can blame the parents for their parenting styles. We can blame the academic rigor of their high school. We can blame the social scene on campus for not being welcoming. Or we can blame the now college-freshmen for not being resilient enough to make it through. Regardless, it's a team effort. We can't be bystanders in the lives of these young people as they launch into adulthood. We are the gatekeepers and we need to be more assertive in sharing our wisdom, assisting students in getting connected, and ultimately leading them to taking charge of their own life. It's a lot of work, and at the end of the day it truly takes a village. In the face of the mental health crisis in higher education, we need a lot more folks to step up and make sure we're helping with this "successful" transition into college.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
Avoiding Google to find mental health treatment programs
How to rationally navigate the behavioral healthcare system while simultaneously in crisis management with your struggling college student.
If you’ve leaned on Google to find a treatment program for your young adult, this article will resonate. If you haven’t, I highly discourage you from even the thought. I’ll save you the agony and share with you that what you’d find would be a search result with over nine million hits. Overwhelmed would be the only way to describe the emotion in receiving those numbers. How do you narrow down from nine million to just one?
At this time, I imagine parents to be working full-time jobs. A justifiable assumption. They’re also possibly managing more children in the household and any other life responsibility that doesn’t stop because your child went off to college. The last thing you have time for is to casually sit down and start doing research to find a treatment program. Its all starts with the thought: “where do I even begin?”
What Google will produce for you on page one is programs that have outrageous marketing budgets and sometimes unethical approaches in just getting “heads on beds.” Yep, I said. Finding the most appropriate program for the needs of your young adult is a full time job in itself. I know, because that’s the work I do.
How do you know if the program is ethical? How do you know that the facility is clean and safe? How do you know that insurance can be applied and that you can afford treatment? And do they even have a space available currently? Is the program family-owned or investment-owned? How long have they been in business? What are the credentials of the program and the clinical team? These are just the tip of the iceberg in questions parents need to be asking. Again, how it is possible to be rational in thinking about these things when you’re in the throes of the crisis with your young adult, working your job, and following through with all the other responsibilities that occupy your time each day? The bottom line; it’s excruciatingly hard.
Ok, so let’s say you call any program. They don’t the have space or after hearing about your child they don’t think it’s a good fit for placement. What do they recommend? They might give you the names of another program, or three others programs. How do you know those programs aren’t owned by the same company? Or, if that referent gets a kick-back for sending a family to the other program? [Yes, that’s a thing. Don’t worry though, the government is working hard to shut that down.] Maybe you have time to call those other programs and they give you more names. All the while, the clock is ticking. We are amid the crisis. How do you find someone who’s not affiliated with a program who can help you with an unbiased opinion. It’s not for free, and it’s certainly not Google.
I’ve met with families who have been lucky. The program staff they connected with had integrity and recommended they connect with another program which happened to be a good match. Or a family friend had a relative that went to XX program and it just so happened to save someone’s life, and you wonder: “can it also do that for my young adult?” A big sigh of relief for those stories! Sadly, I feel like this is underpublicized. I’ve also heard stories of families being cycled through companies, or treatment programs that aren’t effective (or honest) with the work they’re doing. Then don’t even get me started on insurance companies’ dictating the clinical work being done (or not) for young adults in treatment.
Again, this is a lot to take in. Google can’t be to blame either because at the end of the day, they are a business too. They are working hard with their algorithms to mitigate unethical marketing practices. In my personal opinion, when it comes to finding the best care for your young adult’s mental health Google is not a good resource. You want a good resource? Go to the Therapeutic Consulting Association, or All Kinds of Therapy websites. These are people and programs doing evidence-based research, unbiased quality of care for families, and resources for those who have the time to do the research in finding treatment programs themselves. Know that you can find an appropriate program to help your young adult. Know also that you don’t have to be in this crisis alone. There is an army of ethical behavioral healthcare humans out there and we are ready to step in when you call on us.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
How we can explore mental health treatment as a retention initiative
First year retention and 6-year graduation rates are important for all colleges and universities, yet it’s time we started to discuss the idea of a break for mental health treatment as a retention initiative.
Mental Health on campus is a consistent topic of conversation in and out of higher education right now. Most professionals working with Millennials and Gen Z young adults are attuned to their needs and understand a large percentage of this population is really struggling with anxiety and depression. Yet we know that colleges, no matter whether they double their counseling staff, can’t match the demand of what students need. So if we know we won’t have the capacity to have individual or group counseling with all the students who need it, how can we better serve those who may need a higher level of intervention?
Any institution at the end of the day is working overtime to keep students on campus. Of course they care about students’ well-being. And yes, they also care about maintaining retention percentages. Sometimes the work that’s being done in both areas can be rather siloed. I can say this because I worked in the Office of Retention (titled differently) at two separate large universities. A lot of my efforts previously included doing everything I could to outreach to students who were academically struggling and support them in getting connected on campus. The majority of the students I connected with were struggling academically as a product of mental health and substance use problems. As much as I would have rather preferred, the discussion was rarely centered on taking a break that semester and getting help. The students I was working with were experiencing problems and pressures, not yet crisis. The crisis didn’t hit until they were academically suspended.
For any of those students, my recommendation for a program or resource off campus was an out-of-bounds conversation. Knowing how slammed Student Affairs professionals in general are on campus, ethically it would not have been appropriate to make a recommendation anyway. If we can predict that a young adult who proactively seeks treatment, when it’s not at crisis level yet, has a better chance of graduation due to stabilization and/or sobriety, what is stopping us from having this conversation right now?
Anytime I’ve spoken with a Director of Counseling or Director of Case Management, the conversation always consists of how to help the student while they’re still enrolled. Any time I’ve suggested the conversation about it being a retention initiative to encourage students to take a break to get help early and then return, it’s almost like I knock the breath out of the person on the other end of the phone. We’re all working extremely hard to help students when they’re a student on your campus. How could it not be beneficial to support them in getting treatment earlier? How could it not benefit the university in terms of student’s returning to campus to graduate still within that 6-year cohort? It’s a win-win for the student and the university.
Now, if there is a college or university that uses IRB data to look at the students who take a leave for treatment (ie Medical Leave) earlier in their academic career versus later, I’d be fascinated to read those statistics. To know whether or not students return, depending on the time they seek treatment could be predictive of the work we do in guiding students earlier in their academic career. To my knowledge, this information isn’t being collected or reported by any institution, other than possibly in-house. To better continue to support our young adults launching into adulthood on campus, this is an imperative conversation that needs to be broached now.
In the end, we all care about the well-being of current college students. What we know is that a lot of them are struggling and aren’t connected to resources on campus. As an institution of higher education we need to ensure the minds of our young people are in a place to experience this learning. If they choose to take a break for mental health treatment, we ought to explore encouraging them now before it is too late. From a retention lens, I’m saying we need to encourage them to take a break now and return so they can be on track to graduate within that 6-year cohort.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
How Safe is the At Risk Program You are Considering for your Child? Learn to Ask the Right Questions the Right Way
The only thing more terrifying than being in crisis and trying to find a treatment program for your young adult, is then trusting that the program you've selected is "safe." Safety can be subjective, and for a family who is fragile and hyper concerned about the well-being of their young adult while in treatment, it's hard not to have doubt surrounding the care of their child.
Before jumping into recommended questions to ask, it's imperative to share one single tip for families who want answers about safety: always ask directly for clarification and information. In researching programs by reviewing websites or speaking with program staff on the phone, it's easy to be charmed by marketing and walk away with little information. Try to look past the sales pitch by being prepared with questions. Ask about safety directly. If they have a staff who handles Risk Management, ask to speak with that person. It's better to have as much information beforehand to help make an informed decision about the safety of a treatment program.
It's also important to differentiate the different types of safety. Are you asking about physically safety or are you wanting to know more about emotional and mental safety? Without clarification, a program staff may only reference the type of safety they believe is relevant to share. They could discuss gear or protocols for weather, while a parent was referencing what happens if a young adult is being bullied.
If you can, avoid just asking "is your program safe?" The answer for every program will be "Yes." In asking open-ended questions, you will get detailed answers. Open-ended questions typically begin with "what," "how," or "tell me about…" Asking yes and no questions will leave any parent still feeling uncomfortable surrounding safety.
Without being familiar with the spectrum of available treatment program options, it's very easy to be overwhelmed with the research process. What a wilderness therapy program is doing for risk management and safety will be much different than what a residential treatment program is doing. Not to mention, residential treatment programs can range drastically! Below you will find a list of generic questions that will help guide parents to asking about the safety of a program.
Ten Questions to Ask a Treatment Provider/Program about their safety practices:
What measures and procedures are in place for the safety of participants?
Talk me through your Risk Management training for all staff.
What is the staff to participant ratio?
Talk to me about supervision of participants, during the day and at night.
What evidence do you have that your program is safe?
How do you specifically address safety?
What happens if my young adult becomes sick? How far is the closest hospital? What processes are in place for a follow-up appointment (if necessary)?
How will I receive communication regarding the safety of my young adult while they're at your program?
If I Google your program right now, will anything pop up in the search history regarding compromised safety situations? If yes, what changes have you made to mitigate that risk?
Has your program ever had a death? If yes, what have you changed programmatically to ensure that won't happen again?
In the end, the most knowledgeable resource about the safety of a program will be a Therapeutic Consultant. This professional works tirelessly visiting treatment programs to see the space, meet with participants and staff, and to have a finger on the pulse of whether or not a program is truly safe. In addition to the questions listed above, these individuals can provide exhaustive lists of questions for families to ask treatment programs in regards to safety, as well as numerous additional areas that need exploration while exploring treatment programs.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
Winter Break Conversations: College Isn’t Going Anywhere
Winter break can be one of the most exciting times for a college student and yet, it can also be very challenging. For students who are wrapping up their first full semester at college, heading home for the holidays can often be a positive time to regroup and recharge. That is, until grades are posted. For a student who is struggling with anxiety, depression, or other mental health concerns – the next steps and decisions to prepare for another college semester will be critical towards completing a degree on time.
If a student has not performed well academically for reasons related to their mental health and not their academic ability, it is recommended that families not tell their student to “just do better next semester.” Instead, it is recommended families ask their young adult more pointed questions that can get to the root of their academic performance and the challenges they may be experiencing. For example,
“Tell me about how college is really going for you? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your first semester? What was the most challenging thing about being a college student last semester? How can I support you in being more successful, not just academically, in the spring?”
These types of questions can open the door to the conversation about a struggle your student might be having at college. If a family’s only response is disapproval directed towards the academic performance, it can be more challenging for the young adult to advocate for themselves to get the mental health help they need.
International studies have shown that 1 in 3 college students has a diagnosable mental health condition. Put another way, because we are now becoming more aware of mental health issues facing college students (and talking about it more openly), seeking mental health support is healthy and normalized. Thinking ahead now, it’s imperative to strategize the best avenue for collegiate success. There are hundreds of treatment programs out there, and it’s hard to know who to call first for help! There are plenty of resources on campus, and there are just as many off campus too both within health center services and other support offices. Reaching out for help will be the first step. And remember: taking a break from college is also ok! College isn’t going anywhere!
Let your young adult reflect on fall semester during winter break and make a proactive and informed decision regarding their mental health this spring!
For questions or comments contact Joanna.