Education

Harvard Psychiatry Professor: Over Half Of America’s College Students Are MENTALLY ILL

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A Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor has declared that between 50 and 60 percent of America’s college students are beset with some psychiatric disorder.

The professor is Gene Beresin, according to CBS Boston.

In addition to holding a faculty position at Harvard, Beresin is the executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” Beresin told CBS Boston on Thursday. “If you add them all up, 50 percent doesn’t seem that high.”

The professor added that college students’ brains aren’t fully mature because, the current thinking goes, the human brain is not completely developed until people reach the age of 26.

“Living alone, not being prepared to be on your own,” Beresin mused to the station in incomplete sentences. “Peer pressure. I mean, the ability to kind of freely use alcohol or drugs and make those decisions on your own without supervision.”

“A college student kills himself every day,” the professor added.

It’s not clear what data Beresin used to produce his claim that up to 60 percent of U.S. college students have some diagnosable mental illness, but students at the fancypants Massachusetts Institute of Technology are totally on board with the figure.

“People go through tough times,” MIT junior Dane Erickson told CBS Boston. “It’s really stressful sometimes here at school.”

Sophomore Maddie Burgoyne agreed.

“I know a couple of friends who had a difficult first semester last year,” she told the CBS affiliate.

International student Andrea Jaba also agreed.

“There are a lot of new factors that play when you come to college especially for international students who don’t know the area at all but, yeah, it can be overwhelming at times,” the freshman from the Philippines said.

The current cost for a single year of tuition, fees and room and board at MIT is $62,662.

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