Around New England

College Kids Are Nuts, Outgoing UConn President Says

August 1, 2018

Rampant mental illness on college campuses is the biggest problem colleges face, the outgoing president of the University of Connecticut said.

Susan Herbst, who plans to step down as president of UConn in July 2019 to return to teaching and writing, talked in an interview with The Hartford Courant about problems with various amenities on campus, but said mental illness dwarfs them.

“If you were to ask me what’s the one thing that keeps you up at night, it’s not athletics, it’s not the health center. It’s the mental health of our students,” Herbst said.

“I would say that mental health is far and away the biggest student behavioral problem .. that we have at any college or university in the country and any president who is honest will tell you the same thing. We have many transports by our police to hospitals, to pysch units during the year.

“It’s not just stress and anxiety, it’s some real mental illness that needs to be diagnosed and treated. It’s very worrisome, we have a lot of suicide threat and students who are crying out for help, who are sometimes heard and sometimes they are not.”