After seeing a rise in students dealing with anxiety, East Carolina University has improved its counseling services and introduced Recognition, Insight and Openness (RIO), a new program designed to teach students how to manage their stress, according to NBC News.
NBC News reports the changes were put in place after ECU announced that the number of student counseling appointments increased by 16 percent over the past two years. The university even went a step further by declaring that the number of appointments involving a crisis had risen 52 percent.
ECU Director of Counseling Valerie Kisler-van Reede told NBC that “it wasn’t just the numbers” that caused her and other members of the university to grow concerned. Instead, “it was the intensity and severity” of the issues being addressed in appointments that made her feel “like something very different was going on—a lack of resiliency and the ability to cope.”
According to the results of a 2015 survey conducted by Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health, anxiety among college students is on the rise at institutions all across the country. The survey found that half of all students who book on-campus counseling appointments do so because they feel anxious.
Psychology Today’s Peter Gray wrote last year about meeting with the faculty and administration of a major university, where they talked about how many students are unable to handle the sources of stress that surface in their everyday lives. At the meeting, he learned that one student “felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a ‘bitch.’” He said that two other students “sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.”
These may seem like ridiculous reasons to book counseling appointments, but, as NBC News indicates, both situations are key examples of how anxious college students are as they face new challenges living on their own and starting “real life.” ECU hopes that its cognitive-affective stress management techniques (which include things like journaling and meditation) will encourage those who feel as though they can’t “adult” to work through whatever is bringing them down on a daily basis.