A Mental Health ‘Crisis’?

This chapter maps a framework for understanding the rise of mental health disorders in the undergraduate population, drawing a connection between broader social, cultural and educational change, and individual psychological malaise. The structural inconsistencies wrought by high expectations, contrasted with actual opportunities and experience, provide the basis for an insecure and individualised approach to Higher Education. Students experiencing high levels of anxiety are encouraged, both by the pressure to succeed and the procedures now in place within Universities to manage high levels of mental illness, to conceive of and present their distress in medicalised terms. The chapter explores the implications for the academic– student relationship, both in terms of the growing expectation on academics to act in loco parentis, and the extent to which the practice of study and the pursuit of knowledge itself comes to be considered potentially damaging to students’ mental health and emotional wellbeing.