Online only: Mental health care

It all started with an outburst in a classroom at a community college.

After the heinous assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, D-Ariz., the media attempted to plot out how 22-year-old Jared Loughner went from weirdo to murderer. A step in that journey was getting kicked out of Pima County Community College for several in-class outbursts.  

That step has been replayed over and over on television, and in the wake of a Brooklyn College student being committed against her will by her school, it’s clear that students are living in a complicated time to be on campus. Because of Loughner’s social media savvy some have called for colleges to monitor their students’ social networking sites. This is a bad idea. No matter how much Facebook stalking the administration does, mental health can’t be monitored from afar.

Imagine I post “I’m going to kill my professor lol.” Should I visit CAPS? What about “I’m going to stab my professor 57 times”? It’s more descriptive, and maybe that’s an indicator of my seriousness or maybe it’s nothing. For an academic administration to try and piece together the mental health of their student body based on the inane internet musings they post on Facebook is not only a threat to our student rights, it assumes that students wear their well-being on their sleeve.  

Last year IU junior Greg Willoughby committed suicide. Seven days later, somebody found him. There was no Facebook message, no YouTube ramblings, only the untimely death of one our best. I don’t know if anything could have been done to stop Willoughby from taking his own life, but monitoring his Facebook wouldn’t have given us a clue as to what he was going through.

Few people lash out like Loughner did in his classroom. The stress of being a student is something everyone understands, but something most of us deal with on a personal level. Instead of pushing for colleges that can commit their students or monitor their social networking sites, we should be doing our best to create a less stressed academic environment.

In high school my French teacher told me there was no direct translation for the word “stress,” it was a purely American creation. Wouldn’t we perform better in class if we weren’t worried about the lifelong consequences of every class, of every test, of every grade?

Monitoring our web lives is a weak answer to the problem. We should be changing the environment in which we study. Students need less pressure and more understanding. I have a hard enough time explaining my life to my mother. I can only imagine how poorly IU could judge my mental health based on Facebook.


E-mail: thommill@indiana.edu