Mental Health Addressed At Annual College Security Summit

Apr 22, 2008 2:55 PM

Mental-health experts have encouraged college officials to create campus atmospheres where mental illnesses are regarded the same as other medical issues: as treatable and not shameful.

The deadly shootings at Virginia Tech a year ago have brought attention to mental illness among students, along with deficiencies in colleges' emergency plans.

About 200 college officials convened recently at the University of Central Oklahoma for the second National Campus Security Summit, where experts in law enforcement, mental health, education and the law offered advice on how to make campuses safer, according to Tulsa World.

Mental illnesses are not the top threats to campus communities, says Bruce Lochner, director of UCO's student counseling center. He says that accidents -- most involving alcohol -- and suicide are the main causes of death among college students.

However, "people who are contemplating suicide are more likely to be violent," Lochner says.

Gene Deisinger of Iowa State University's police says, "Are most suicidal folks homicidal? No, but there is a subset of those who are."

Julie Young, coordinator of trauma and prevention services for the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, encouraged college leaders to recognize stigmas associated with mental illnesses.

Many people don't know much about mental illnesses, so they fear and disassociate with people who have them, Young told Tulsa World. People with mental illnesses don't seek help because they don't want to be stigmatized.

The department's commissioner, Terri White, says more than one in four Oklahomans struggles with severe mental illness or addiction. Half of those diseases emerge by age 14 and three-fourths by age 24.

Treatment of depression is successful 80 percent of the time and of schizophrenia 60 percent, she says. According to White, that's more treatable than heart disease, which has a treatment success rate of 41 percent to 52 percent.

Other speakers encouraged colleges to create teams of authorities to meet regularly and share information to refer students to mental-health services and to keep tabs on students who could be safety threats.

Kathryn Gage, UCO's vice president for student affairs, pointed out that college students, for the first time in their lives, have moved away from their support systems, comfort zones and structured lives.

Lochner adds that these stressors and factors such as changing sleep patterns can precipitate mood disorders and depression.

Deisinger cautions, though, that officials cannot use profiling to identify the next possible school shooter.

He and Marisa Randazzo, president of Threat Assessment Resources International, encourages colleges instead to gather facts about particular students and draw objective conclusions from those facts, rather than from how other students have behaved.

Tulsa World reports that Deisinger also encourages colleges to fix problems that students point out, besides helping troubled students.

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