Literature Review #1

Literature Review

Tangled Up in the Blue- Ed Finkel

1.

2. Finkel, E. (2016). TANGLED UP in blue. Community College Journal, 86(5), 38-42. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1788738123?accountid=13626

3. This article is an analysis on the state of mental health facilities on community campus. The biggest point being made is that community college campuses need more resources than four year campuses even though they have less. A lot of offices that offer student mental support are also the same people that provide academic support, so the combination of the two are lethal because students need the separation. The article also cotains tactis to combat it. 

4. The Author is Ed Finkel. Finkel graduated from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. He wroked as a writer for Chicago Layer magazine, assistant editor of The Public Innovator Newsletter, managing editor for The neighborhood Works Manazine, and served as in house editor at Medill. In 2002 he become a full time freelancer. His website is here:  http://edfinkel.com/

5. Academic advising is one key concept here. This is because a large issue they touch on in the article is that most mental health facilities on campus are also intertwined with academic advising, the two do not separate. Students need the time to step away from school and help themselves personally but they find it hard when because under trained academic advisers are the ones counseling students. Another few terms are anxiety, depression, and stress. These are highest reported issues among college students when campuses were surveyed. These are buzz terms that I will be using within my paper because these issues are what are found most in colleges. 

6. The first quote that I found was from Amy Lehart, the president of ACAA. She stated, "You're going to do mental health counseling, but guess what you're also going to do academic advising. It can be problematic." The second quote I found was also from Lehart where she says, "In some cases, students are not aware mental health counseling exists on campus-- and in a limited number of cases-- it actually doesn't." I think that this quote really speaks to the issue. The counseling circle is so small on campus that some students do not even know they have the option, while some schools do not even have it at all.

7. This article will be a huge help! It gives me some statistics that are reliable, it jumps deep in to how campuses fail students, and it gives ways to intervene the issues. This will be a strong piece for when I talk about the condition of on campus health resources playing in to the issue of lower student welfare. 

Academic Sources

- I think that I want to lead in with the fact that students today are obviously more stressed than they used to be so many years ago. With that, I have found an article from the American Psychological Association (APA) that provides statistics on the increase in mental health disorder reports since the 1990s. This way I can prove that the spike has been drastic in the last ten years and I am able to hone in on what is going on in the school environment and student environment to cause this:

The State of Mental Health on Growing Campuses: A Growing Crisis." Www.apa.org. Education Government Relations Office, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2017. <http://www.apa.org/about/gr/education/news/2011/college-campuses.aspx>.

- From there I want to talk about these statistics and how society is changing and shifting which is causing these issues with mental health. In Chapter two of "One Nation Under Stress," speaks of the stress of modern life. While this context applies to a past version of modern life, it does help me merge in to the fact that college environments are changing. It goes deep in to the evolution of stress and how it is appraoched. 

Becker, Dana. "Chapter Two: Getting and Spending: The Wear and Tear of Modern Life."One Nation under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 19-48. Print

- Once I have been able to introduce the new campus environment, I can make use of the texts we have gotten in class. When speaking of privatization, I can use The Student Loan Scam and The Price of Privatization. From there I will explain how this is changed the way students view school and what kind of pressure this puts on them. I can further utilize the other texts we were given to back that up. I also plan to find an article on job inflation, this is another pressure that students face. 

Newfield, Christopher.  “The Price of Privatization.”  The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. 18-34.  Print.

Collinge, Alan Michael. “The Rise of Sallie Mae and the Fall of Consumer Protections.” The Student Loan Scam.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. 1-19. Print. 

- After this, I will end with the fact that mental health facilities cannot keep up with the boom in students needing care. I will use this meta-analysis I found on mental health facilities across US community college campuses that backs up the point that colleges can't keep up. I will then reflect on how this plays in to the issues. 

Finkel, E. (2016). TANGLED UP in blue. Community College Journal, 86(5), 38-42. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1788738123?accountid=13626

Field, Kelly. "Stretched to Capacity: What Campus Counseling Centers Are Doing to Meet Rising Demand." The Chronicle of Higher Education. N.p., 6 Nov. 2016. Web. <http://www.chronicle.com/>.

Project Further Ideas

I think the biggest question I want to answer in my project is: why are stress levels and mental health prevalence higher in recent years? The intensity of this stress is extremely new, within the last ten years. Is this stress coming from the students themselves or college itself? For my paper, I plan to tackle a few different angles of why this occurring. Among those angles are environmental shifts in university. I think that this is extremely important, the environment of college has changes drastically in the last few years. This is devoted to things like privatization and its results, different/modern home environments, job opportunities, and mental health resources.. Piggybacking off of environment is the bad state of the mental health services in college. Commonly, they are used to training places for graduate/doctoral students and do nor provide thorough, specialized care for students. As a result, students struggling can feel option less. This can be seen in the article provided to be on mental health services. Titled, "Stretched to Capacity," the article from The Chronicle talks about how students that are struggling in university are on the rise and investigates how schools are tackling the issue. It also speaks of what schools can do to attend to this spike in appointments. Further, job opportunities in this time are sparse. To be successful, which is making enough money to be comfortable, you either need to pursue a rigorous undergrad, or pursue higher education. Whatever it may be, it is a lot of work and can be very daunting. Every grad counts. I am looking in the book that has been provided to be which proposes that stress is more than just actual stress, that we stress about being stressed about stress. "One Nation Under Stress," by Dana Becker speaks of how we have blown stress out of proportion and turned it in to something bigger than itself. I am extremely interested to look even further than I already have. When I looked in to the topic, I found an article titled "Tangled up in the Blue" by Ed Finkel, which is a mass survey narration of mental health facilities in Colleges. I think one issue I will run in to with this topic is if I am looking in to surveys, I have to really think about the validity of these surveys.

Project Proposal

On the first day of class, we spoke about what we would write our final papers on. I automatically chose stress in college. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, for I am a senior psychology major applying to graduate school for social work. I, like many others my age, suffer from severe anxiety that did not peak until I reached college. I think it would be interesting to find out what has made stress levels in university so high in the last few years. Since it is such a recent spike, I plan to look in to privatization's role, along with other factors in every day college stress. Does the stress come from the students or the university?