More students seek offical accomodations from instructors for psychiatric disabilities, mental illness

Many of them suffer in silence, their professors and peers unaware of their day-to-day challenges. Keeping up with attendance policies - especially in lab sciences and foreign languages - can be a big hurdle for them. So can staying on top of assignments, completing tests in the allotted time and maintaining focus for the entirety of a lecture. Sometimes, professionals say, the hardest part of the day for them is just getting out of bed.
They are the growing number of students with mental illnesses severe enough to warrant seeking disability accommodations from their instructors.
The University's Disability Resources Office has seen its requests for official documentation of psychiatric disability increase 80 percent over the past three years, Melissa Manning, associate director, said.
In those three years, the number of students requesting the office's services has increased every semester. Psychiatric disability, such as major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and generalized anxiety disorder, is quickly becoming the commonest form of documented disability on campus. In short, the number of students with special needs due to mental illness is surpassing the number of students requiring accommodations due to physical disabilities. The total number of students enrolled in Disability Resources' programs varies even within a given semester, Manning said, but is usually about 700.
The upward trend is dramatic - and reflected on campuses across the country, psychiatric professionals said. Because many students dealing with mental health problems do not seek out treatment or realize disability accommodations are available, it is impossible to know if there are even more students who may also be eligible.

Disability Resources had to restructure the organization of its staff to accommodate the growing demand, Manning said. The two main mental health service providers on campus, the KU Psychological Clinic and Counseling and Psychological Services, are operating on month-long waiting lists. Both the KU Psychological Clinic and CAPS provide psychological assessments and write recommendations for disability accommodations, if students meet diagnostic criteria.
The exact cause of the spike in students with documented psychiatric disabilities is unknown.
"Whether it's because more students with psychiatric disabilities are able to go to college, because more students feel OK coming forward and getting help or because there are actually more kids with these kinds of problems, we just don't know," Manning said.
Sarah Kirk, the director of the KU Psychological Clinic, said determining the cause of the increase is complicated even further by the fact that college can be a trigger for mental illness. This is because, Kirk said, many students are ill-equipped to deal with the increased workload of university-level courses, haven't learned good study skills, do not know how to balance competing areas of interest in their lives or have experienced some sort of trauma.
Kirk said another possible factor is the independence and self-direction required in college, especially at a large university such as the University of Kansas. Kirk said her office works hard to keep up communication with Disability Resources, but the scale of the campus, the limitation of her office as a teaching facility and the sheer volume of students seeking treatment makes finding a support network for students with mental illness difficult.
"In an ideal world, the campus would be much smaller for these students," Kirk said. "And there would be a real integrated service package for them."
Kirk said some students get high-quality support service at the high-school level, making them feel able to go to college, but then do not get the help they need once they get there.

David Raney, guidance counsellor at Lawrence High School, said he thought students were often left on their own after years of support from licensed practitioners who came to them in schools to seek out help on their own at the college level.
Raney also said he thought the number of students with mental illness was in fact on the rise, possibly, he said, due to a culture of medication and misdiagnosed treatment.
Manning said one of her frustrations in trying to help students with psychiatric disabilities was the lack of long-term psychiatric care on campus.
Because the KU Psychological Clinic is run by students, its ability to see students long-term is limited. CAPS focuses on short-term care and recommends severe cases to Bert Nash, Douglas County's community mental health service center.
Patricia Roach Smith, a director of Bert Nash, said her office sees students, but does mainly focus on helping students and individuals in crisis, not the common long-term disorders and issues faced by many students seeking disability accommodation.
"We're happy to see them," Roach Smith said, referring to students, "but test anxiety isn't exactly our bread and butter."
Manning and Kirk both said most instructors at the University were willing to help work with students with psychiatric disabilities, but that the students still often struggle to get the accommodations they need.
"Hidden disabilities are always a little harder," Manning said. "There appears to be nothing holding them back, but really, they need help to overcome what's going on inside."
As the number of students with psychiatric disabilities has increased, though, through hard work, compromises with instructors and perhaps taking a little extra time, so too has the number of these students who are graduating, Manning said.
"I think they feel a little left out sometimes because there's this big push to graduate in four, but our students can't always do that," she said. "But when they make it, it's doubly rewarding to see them do well."