A Case for a New Anonymous Support Service for Students
Why I built Team Roots
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports about 73% of college students have admitted to experiencing a mental health crisis (defined as “extreme feelings of anxiety, panic, depression about school and life. Difficulty adjusting to a new routine and environment. Feelings of homesickness, loneliness and isolation. Stressed or overwhelmed about course load”); however, 35% of these responders reported that their university does not know anything about it (Gruttadaro). Kenyatta, a senior at Penn, describes the reason for the phenomena, “Despite whatever’s going on — if you’re stressed, a bit depressed, if you’re overwhelmed — you want to put up this positive front” (Scelfo). Students make this choice because they fear the stigma associated with mental health issues, and decide that “disclosing do not outweigh the risks”; furthermore, such a stigma makes dwelling on a mental health issue more dangerous to academic and social success than suppressing it (Gruttadaro). As a mental health crisis swells amongst students and has even led to some suicides at suburban high schools and top tier colleges, we (society) clearly need a way to work around the stigma of mental health. As noted by a NAMI survey respondent, “everyone will experience a mental health issue at some point in their lives and need to be aware of it so it is not detrimental to their health” (Gruttadaro).
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports about 73% of college students have admitted to experiencing a mental health crisis…however, 35% of these responders reported that their university does not know anything about it
Over the past one and a half years, I have dedicated most of my non-academic work to using my programming skills to create a technological aid to resolve the mental health crisis that so many people around me and I have struggled with. My team and I have come up with an instant messaging, counseling service, that allows students to reach out to listeners within their community that they know, anonymously. The following paper serves as an assessment about the benefits and limits of my approach. Such private (or one on one), enhanced instant messaging services create an alternative, always available option for sharing personal feelings that removes the barriers of anxiety and shame. Thus, this tool can alleviate the growing mental health crisis caused by the social and academic pressures placed on students in top tier institutions for higher education and high schools in suburban, affluent communities. Nonetheless, these tools only serve as a Band-Aid rather than a complete solution to the crisis. A stronger solution lies in the seemingly intractable problem of remodeling how these educational institutions operate so that they instill within students an intrinsic motivation for their goals at an equal or higher level than a desire for external validation.
“It’s almost a cliché to complain about the alienating effects of technology, but the Internet is an amazing resource for combating isolation”(Shu).
Catherine Shu, a TechCrunch writer, observes, “It’s almost a cliché to complain about the alienating effects of technology, but the Internet is an amazing resource for combating isolation”(Shu). A research study published on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database proves that, under certain constraints, “web-based…anxiety interventions” can work better than the conventional “control” methods of in person conversation and ones that do not factor communication tech into the equation, for a general population (Farrer). As Lansik, a 17 year-old student, as a part of his teacher’s experiment to use social media as an aid for her class, remarks, “ ‘When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up…When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel’” (Gabriel). Lansik feels this way because confronting his classmates with his opinion in person will likely cause him to feel judged more strongly by his peers if he is wrong. I have seen such a scenario play out in many lectures at USC. Despite a professor’s request for students’ questions on a difficult topic only a few will ask anything, because most are afraid of judgment from their peers (which, especially, in large lectures does occur). After the lecture students will flood the teacher with help requests through anonymous posts on Piazza, a question and answer site for these classes. Thus, the site allows students to gain more from their education, by breaking the barriers of social anxiety. Furthermore, students can also post at any time on Piazza, which allows them to communicate questions when they come up with them rather than wait for the next class. Such online tools provide an always-available service for requesting help.
Compared to social media and public message boards, instant messaging services bring these advantages to a whole new level, because users expect faster responses and the app’s environment encourages conversation over PSAs (public service announcements). For example, Crisis Text Line, a twenty-four hour text line for emotional crisis intervention, has received five million texts and prevents one suicide a day (Gregory). An analysis of CTL’s success reveals that “teen-agers can often seem willfully uncommunicative in speech” but “are forthcoming, even garrulous, when texting” as communicating by texting is natural to them (Gregory). A CTL employee, Jen James, confirms this finding, commenting, “With the text line, they [people, mainly in reference to teenagers] are pretty open (Gregory). They just come out and tell you and want to talk about it.” Moreover, CTL and other services like it “enhance” instant messaging in a way that further removes the barriers to social anxiety and allows these services to operate twenty-four seven.
For example, CTL enhances its system with anonymity. CTL counselors only know what texters share with them, and CTL attributes their users’ openness to the “great lengths” they take “to insure that texters’ identity remains secret” (Gregory). This makes logical sense. “If you’re hiding from an abusive relative or you just don’t want your classmates to know how overwhelmed you feel about applying to college,” it is far easier to overcome the anxiety or shame of sharing these problems by doing so anonymously (Gregory). Seven Cups of Tea (7Cups) is an instant messaging app that uses anonymity. The app allows the user to employ various methods to connect with a listener whose bio appeals to him or her and then have a conversation with the listener while being anonymous. The free app has reached a total of 90,000 users (Carpenter).
In addition to anonymity, both 7Cups and CTL enhance their services by using groups of counselors to ensure that they operate twenty four-seven. CTL has a certified, trained task force of up to fifty people “at any given time,” while 7Cups has a process for volunteers from the general public to signup and go through a background check (Gregory, Shu). This voluntary human capital helps 7Cups create a place as Glen Moriarty, CEO of the company, describes, “where you can get support. Late at night, when you are all alone” (Shu). Twenty-four seven access plays a significant role in the success of these services. CTL’s data supports it. They have found that depression peaks at “8 P.M., anxiety at 11 P.M., self-harm at 4 A.M., and substance abuse at 5 A.M”(Gregory). Moriarty explains how the significance of around the clock operation also applies to 7Cups through his personal anecdote. He states, while using 7Cups, “I don’t have to worry about burning my friends out. I can’t call my therapist at 11 o’clock at night, but I can just go on and see if there is a listener available” (Shu).
Privacy is another feature that instant messaging services have that makes it less stressful for users to connect with listeners. An app similar to 7Cups, Thrivo comes with well-tested “encryption; you can be safe in the knowledge that your communication is secure” (Graham). 7Cups surely does that too, and CTL counselors “sign a stringent agreement to protect confidentiality”(Gregory). Privacy guarantees make users more likely to trust a service with their personal or embarrassing information that relates to a mental health condition. Thus, by building such a trust with its users, instant messaging services make it easier to break the barrier of social anxiety that accompanies sharing shameful personal feelings.
Certain instant messaging services have come to take advantage of community sharing and building in attempt to decrease social anxiety. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Peer2Peer, an anonymous web-based peer support platform…allows users to chat with fellow students” within their university (Gopinath). Therefore, students have a way to reach out to people within their community. 7Cups also takes advantage of community, by grouping users and counselors into “specific issues or resources” (Shu). Because “specific issues or resources” relate to people within similar communities or the same community, 7Cups’ grouping connects people who are more likely to be in the same community (Shu). Community plays a significant role in decreasing social anxiety, because it often becomes easier and less embarrassing for users to share their personal feelings if their listeners can relate to their unique situations, and people within closer proximity to users and who are exposed to similar issues and concerns are more likely to provide empathetic, relevant advice. Peer2Peer allows its creators to “tailor” their counseling “to MIT [students’]…needs,” as opposed to trying to accommodate the general population with its myriad needs and issues (Gopinath). A college physiatrist or student mental health advocate volunteering for 7Cups understands most, the academic and social pressure in education and thus provides better counseling to a student that feels overwhelmed by his or her workload than to a mother considering a divorce or a father dealing with his autistic child. The more specific the advice, the more helpful and targeted the experience will feel for the person in need.
Volunteers like college physiatrists or student mental health advocates on these services exemplify that enhanced instant messaging can help to tame the growing mental health crisis. The study referenced earlier published on NCBI also concludes that, “technology-based interventions may be highly relevant to university populations”(Farrer). These interventions have become “highly relevant” because academic and social pressures at colleges cause students to force upon themselves unhealthy habits. Students have anxiety about sharing the problems they face with these habits, and these feelings cause the mental illness crisis. The academic and social pressures within top tier higher education institutions come from a “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, co curricular and social endeavor”(Scelfo). A few of these colleges have come up with names for this pressure of perfection (Scelfo). “At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles”(Scelfo).
At Penn, they call it the Penn face; students put on a positive front or “face,” while in reality they feel like they are struggling (“Deconstructing the Penn Face.”).There exists no doubt students feel the pressure to be perfect at almost every single top tier college.
The pressure of perfection leads to the setting of high expectations by students. The setting of high expectations pushes students to achieve more; however, it also leads to the habit of them harming their self-worth and self-esteem, when they do not reach those expectations and everyone around them seems to do the contrary. Students at top tier colleges will often not reach their expectations because they have raised the bar so high for themselves. “Irrespective of their [students’] GPA, their leadership position, or however perfect their life may seem on social media- [students] have to struggle with the same issues”(“Deconstructing the Penn Face.”). Even the most successful do not reach the bar all the time. Because the people around them and these students themselves expect them to, when they do not succeed, they often get hit the strongest with feelings of “demoralization, and alienation”(Gruttadaro). Students at these institutions end up feeling embarrassed sharing (or even thinking about) the “hard” truth that they are not perfect, that they are not always the best at everything they do (Scelfo). Their embarrassment to share natural feelings about the problems they face causes conditions like anxiety or depression (Scelfo).
Due to these social and academic pressures, students at college have also picked up the unhealthy habit of “bingeing” with almost every decision they make. “Binge watching is a real phenomenon” and the same goes for binge eating (Seth). Students also “engage in binge studying — all-nighters before tests and stupefying blocks of last-minute cramming,” which causes another binge problem, Adderall abuse (Seth, Yanes). Binge culture grows in college campuses, because it often receives external validation in social settings, and people require external validation to fit society’s definition of perfection. It also seems like a cost minimizing technique for dealing with the extreme stress caused by the pressure for perfection.
However, consequences also accompany the practice. Students do harm themselves by gaining the freshman fifteen, going sleepless and high on caffeine, or digging the social or academic hole they try to avoid. Nonetheless, bingeing comes off as part of the college experience. The “college experience” label makes it seem like a habit that everyone goes through and does not get bothered that much by the consequences (Seth). Thus, when students do feel the real results of excessive bingeing, they feel afraid of or even entirely ignore a confrontation of it, as it would embarrass them (struggling with binge habits does not seem to be part of the same college experience that includes binge habits).
Embarrassment allows for a continuation of bingeing, which eventually does feed into the mental illness crisis on campus. The NAMI survey earlier referenced shows eating disorders (58%), drug abuse (42%), and alcohol abuse (35%) as some of the top problems college students face in relation into mental health, an indicator that a binge culture, caused by social and academic pressures, plays a significant role in the crisis (Gruttadaro).
These pressures also affect high schools located at suburban, affluent communities, although they come from a different source. The suburban, affluent communities referenced have become populated with the “meritocratic elite” — people who have worked admirably hard to achieve their social status and aim to instill the same values within their children (Rosin). To do so, the meritocratic elite praise their children’s successes, which sounds healthy, but “praise” often “comes only when a child succeeds”(Rosin). Thus, the “child is likely to develop a sense that his or her parents’ affection depends upon good grades, or touchdowns, or mastery of a religious text, or whatever the parents’ priorities might be”(Rosin). This well-intentioned parenting leads to a “survival mindset,” a Harvard or bust mentality amongst students in these high schools. As they have learnt from the culture they live in, they need to join a “summer immersion program to skip ahead and get into AP French…sophomore year” or have “that internship…with a Stanford professor”(Subbarao, Rosin). A student from a highly competitive New Jersey high school district explains, “Coming out of 12 years in this district, I have learned one thing: that a grade, a percentage or even a point is to be valued over anything else”(Spencer).
These developments might actually sound important to the competitiveness of American education; students become incredibly accomplished and “great at what they’re doing,” but that thought should immediately take the backseat when considering the unhealthy habit high school students adopt of damaging one’s own self-esteem (similar to that of college students), when they sometimes fail to achieve greatness (Rosin, Deresiewicz). That shame leads to a visible mental illness crisis. At a school where I have taken almost all my standardized tests, Gunn High, “42…students” have “been hospitalized or treated for ‘significant suicide ideation.’” “Today Gunn is like countless other high-achieving high schools in countless other affluent communities — New York; Washington, D.C.; Dallas; Greenwich, Connecticut; Seattle; Los Angeles — only more so”(Rosin). In regards to bingeing, high school students have also adopted the habit, although in a milder form than the one that develops in college. Parents can successfully moderate most binge habits, and they recognize binge habits, like losing sleep, eating junk food, and of course abusing drugs and alcohol, are unhealthy; nonetheless, “many busy [high school] students tout their sleep deficits like a badge of honor”(Noguchi). A study comparing an inner city school to one in a competitive, suburban school district has found that in the richer school “the proportion of kids who” have “smoked, drank, or used hard drugs” is significantly higher (Rosin). While high school communities have lessened the problem by attempting to make students entirely abstain from most choices that could lead to binge habits, “the pressure of perfection” still manages to sometimes support these choices over the warnings that students have received. Furthermore, the embarrassment and anxiety of sharing the problems they face with these choices becomes even more extreme than what a college student feels doing so, because these students are still under parental control. They have to adhere to the values of their home and family, as opposed to what happens when they get to college and adapt to the values of the university and subsequent peer pressure.
So a mental illness crisis exists in top tier institutions for higher education and suburban, affluent high school districts, and the anxiety and shame to share problems that stem from social and academic pressure cause it. Instant messaging apps can alleviate the crisis, because with the right enhancements, they remove the barrier of social anxiety (the shame of talking about a problem in the first place), which is the first step to tackling the issue. However, while creating a medium that removes the barrier allows students to seek help more openly, a more complete solution lies in instilling within students an intrinsic motivation for their goals at an equal or higher level than a desire for external validation.
The values of competing for success, getting a high GPA, and performing extraordinarily in all extracurriculars “more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind” (Deresiewicz). Nonetheless, most students’ motivation come mainly from such values, creating “excellent sheep,” who are “great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it”(Deresiewicz, Heller). A U.S. News report shows that many high school students who have gotten into top tier institutions have ended up switching their majors (Sheehy). While a high school students applying to college should not be expected to know what they want to do, as these students have not yet had the college to explore their interests, it puts into question the motivation of the extracurricular activities they have pursued and boasted on their college apps. Palo Alto High Principal “‘Diorio says she often asks kids what they do for fun, ‘and they can’t answer that question’”(Rosin). If we create a culture that allows students to have more fun in high school, not all of them will become doctors and lawyers, but the academic and social pressures that harm their emotional well-being will decrease. Furthermore, some of them might turn out far more successful in less conventional careers, rewarded for pursuing their creative interests rather than what everyone recommends.
“‘Diorio says she often asks kids what they do for fun, ‘and they can’t answer that question’”(Rosin)
Ex-Ivy League professor William Deresiewicz states that, “Very few [of his students] were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development,” although these students could easily “interview on a moment’s notice [or they had what it takes to succeed]”(Deresiewicz). Deresiewicz points out there exists no diversity in the fields that students end up taking after graduation; they often take on a risk averse profession “for track-based, well-paid industries like finance and consulting” and now technical roles at large companies, instead of pursuing what might really ignite their spark, like writing a novel, researching a scientific theory, dancing and performing in plays or films, and coming up with an ideas for a startup (Heller).
As Erza Klein, a writer for the Business section of the Washington Post concludes, “It’s that so many of their students [graduates from top tier universities] end up…so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can make”(Klein).
Unfortunately, there seems no effective way to remodel educational institutions in a way that guarantees that most students will succeed by doing whatever they want to do. In other terms, if high schools and colleges remove tests and the other educational tools that currently ensure high academic standards, how else can we ensure student success? The problem seems intractable.
Since there exists no obvious way to eliminate the social and academic pressures students face at elite institutions of higher education and high schools in suburban, affluent communities, we should aim to solve the growing mental illness crisis caused by them by providing a medium to alleviate the anxiety students sometimes feel. With the right combination of features like anonymity, a sense of community, and twenty-four seven operation, instant messaging apps can remove the barriers of anxiety and shame in communication and hence serve as that medium of support.
There exist quite a few solutions out there already, so why build another one? We need a new one because “suicide is the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four” and 73% of college students have admitted to experiencing a mental health crisis(Gregory, Gruttadaro). If there exists a new platform made for everyday support that can tailor to students’ situations by including the people around them as listeners, they might use it. As shown by this assessment, my approach can work, despite its limitations.
Works Cited
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