(Radio Iowa) – Surveys on college campuses around the country — and in Iowa – indicate anxiety and depression rates among students continue to rise. The University of Iowa is in the process of hiring three coordinators to guide students to the level of counseling or assistance they may need. Sara Hansen is vice president for student life at the University of Iowa.
“One of the things our students would tell us, I think, across all three campuses is how happy they are to be back on campus,” Hansen says, “but that doesn’t erase kind of the challenges and the fatigue that have built up over the last year, year and a half.”

Nearly nine out of 10 University of Iowa undergrads who answered a recent survey said they had experienced more stress due to the pandemic. Michael Newton, head of Iowa State University’s public safety department, says staff as well as students are struggling and his officers have undergone training in how to respond to someone experiencing a mental health crisis. “The mental health issues and problems that we’re seeing really were exacerbated by the pandemic,” Newton says.

Toyia Younger is senior vice president for student affairs at Iowa State University. She says a relatively new self-help program for I-S-U students meets them where they are — online. “Ironically, we started this before the pandemic and little did we know that almost a year later we would find ourselves in need of significant online therapy opportunities for our students, so we are really pleased with that,” Younger says, “and that’s one of the things that we’ll continuing providing services with.”

Helen Haire is director of the University of Northern Iowa’s department of public safety. She says students are sometimes using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate and deal with their stress or mental health issues. During calendar year 2020, there was a little bit of a decrease in alcohol-related arrests on the Cedar Falls campus, but a slight uptick in drug referrals.
“Some of our neighboring states have legalized marijuana and, because of that, a lot of our students may be a little bit more complacent or a little bit more willing to use the marijuana in our (residence) halls, particularly,” she says. “That’s where most of our referrals come from.”

Another U-N-I administrator says fellow students and faculty are often the first to notice a student is in distress — and many of the students who arrive at the campus counseling center for the first time are accompanied by a professor or by another student.