The growing mental health crisis on campus is no longer confined to the students. "All the structural changes affecting today's students—overwork, competitiveness, technological shifts, commercialism—extend to the lives of faculty," reports Rebecca Herzig, an associate professor at Bates College in Maine.
No one knows the extent of the problem. But Herzig heads a committee on faculty issues for the pioneering Bringing Theory to Practice Project, which seed-funds innovative solutions to the collegiate mental health crisis. Plus, she's spent the past academic year on several faculties—Harvard, MIT, University of California at Santa Cruz, as well as Bates.
So far, Herzig admits, the evidence is mostly anecdotal, but on every campus during her sabbatical year, she says she was approached by presidents and deans describing problems such as an increase in suicidal thoughts among colleagues. When UC Santa Cruz's chancellor, Denise Denton, took her own life in June, the urgency of the situation came home.
