What Crisis? Competing Narratives of Mental Health in US Higher Education.

Mental health professionals working with college students articulated five distinct competing narratives to understand student distress rather than accepting or rejecting the 'mental health crisis' framing wholesale.

• The study drew on interviews with 35 mental health professionals working with college students.
• The five frameworks identified were: (1) a mental health crisis emphasizing increasing student psychopathology; (2) a developmental crisis attributing distress to disrupted adolescent development; (3) an access crisis focusing on overwhelmed institutional capacity; (4) a crisis of meaning highlighting semantic instability of diagnostic language; and (5) a crisis of higher education locating the problem in structural conditions and achievement culture.
• Each framing was found to 'render certain aspects of the situation visible while obscuring others' and to 'authorize particular forms of expertise.'
• Each framing also implies 'fundamentally different interventions.'

The 'mental health crisis' has become the dominant framework for understanding student distress in US higher education.

• The paper treats 'crisis' as a framing device that 'performs political work,' drawing on critical scholarship in this area.
• The dominance of this framing was the starting point for examining how practitioners themselves understand and critique it.
• Professionals were found to both use and push back against this dominant narrative in various ways.

A developmental crisis narrative attributed student distress to disrupted adolescent development stemming from technology use and changing parenting practices.

• This was identified as one of five competing crisis narratives articulated by the 35 interviewed professionals.
• It locates the source of distress in developmental disruption rather than in psychopathology per se.
• This framing implies different interventions than a strictly biomedical or institutional framing.

A 'crisis of meaning' narrative highlighted the semantic instability of diagnostic language as it circulates in vernacular usage among students.

• Professionals identified the migration of clinical diagnostic language into everyday student usage as a distinct problem worthy of its own crisis framing.
• This framing focuses on how mental health terminology loses or shifts meaning outside of clinical contexts.
• It was one of five competing narratives identified across the 35 interviews.

A 'crisis of higher education' narrative located the problem in structural conditions and achievement culture rather than in individual students or institutional capacity.

• This framing was one of five competing narratives articulated by professionals in the study.
• It positions upstream structural and cultural factors — rather than student psychopathology or service access — as primary causes of distress.
• Professionals articulating this framing faced 'a limited capacity to address upstream causes of distress' in their clinical work.

The multiplication of crisis narratives among practitioners represents both a symptom of conceptual complexity and an effort to make visible what dominant framings obscure.

• The paper argues this multiplication is not merely confusion but reflects deliberate efforts by professionals to highlight aspects of student distress not captured by the dominant 'mental health crisis' frame.
• Professionals simultaneously face 'multiple simultaneous pressures' while addressing patients' needs.
• The study was based on qualitative interviews with 35 mental health professionals.