Substance Use Among College Students: Insights & Support

Students have 24/7 access to health experts through our custom phone app—enabling them to speak to a provider when their need is greatest. In addition, communities that can establish a positive peer prevention program will see even better results. By identifying those individuals, you can create a “Wellness Team,” perhaps championed by a trusted school counselor. Students spend most of their day in school, and school personnel are influential role models. Tune in to live webinars every week during the school year to get specific, research-backed insight you can immediately apply at your school.

Substance Prevalence Among College Students

• Baseline analysis of the intervention and control groups in terms of the sociodemographic and clinical data are presented in Table 2.
• Intervention measures in the school context can alleviate the substance use behavior of at-risk groups, promote the physical and mental health and academic performance of students, and create a virtuous circle, benefiting more adolescents.
• It is in the spirit of this moment that the committee believes that academic leaders have an important role to play in bringing together the different communities on campus to address those aspects of institutional culture that do not support the mental health and wellbeing of all students, particularly students who are BIPOC or who come from other underrepresented groups.
• This compares to 2.6% of their peers who aren’t at college.
• The appeal of this approach is the possibility of identifying problems and intervening before they become potentially dangerous (see Chapter 4 for more information about campus response to student death by suicide).

There are solutions to each of these issues, but they require action by state legislators and insurance regulators, and in some cases the federal government, to ensure that services provided by higher education institutions can be covered. A 2014 survey of college and university board chairs and presidents, for example, found that about 60 percent believe the financial stability of higher education is moving in the wrong direction (Selingo, 2015). Academic institutions are therefore caught between the need to expend more resources on student wellbeing while not increasing the overall cost of education. Nevertheless, the committee endorses the use of the Mental Health Equity Framework as a foundation for practice and encourages each individual campus to set additional priorities, strategies, and actions to ensure an equitable and inclusive culture. For an individual, the stigma related to mental illness and substance use issues has a number of possible influences, including their family’s views and history; interpretations and lessons from cultural, religious, and spiritual connections; social norms; and their peer group’s beliefs and actions (NASEM, 2016). These action commissions have an effective leadership structure (it may be a single leader or a small group, depending on the needs of the institution) and a clear charge to build or maintain a culture that supports student wellbeing.

For example, 89% of students at FSU found a designated driver when they had been out drinking, and around 55% of the students report drinking responsibly.81 There is not any information from previous to compare these numbers with, making it unclear as to whether or not these numbers have improved. Study drugs, particularly Ritalin, are considered gateway drugs, meaning they open the door to other, more intense drugs. Because addiction does not require heavy use, anyone that uses drugs could be at risk for addiction.

NEWS CENTER

Table 3 displays beta coefficients for the college-level alcohol prevention domain scores as well as the overall index representing the strategies as considered in aggregate. We conducted t-tests to examine whether there were any associations between implementation of the online Hispanic and Latino Student Mental Health Guide alcohol education course, ratings for alcohol prevention strategies, and alcohol-related behaviors. We then examined associations between each domain-level alcohol prevention strategy rating and students’ reports of alcohol use, binge drinking, and related problems. Alcohol prevention coordinators at each participating college indicated which (if any) of these strategies their campuses had implemented, and with what degree of intensity. Random samples of approximately 200 first-year students at the 22 colleges were invited to participate in this survey.

Making appropriate mental health services more available in primary care settings can also facilitate students’ access to mental health care and improve coordination between mental health and primary care providers, both on campus and in telehealth services. Studies have found that the stigma around mental health and substance use treatment services is particularly high among students of color (Cheng, Kawn, and Sevig, 2013; Lipson et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019a). There are several for-profit vendors of referral programs that can match students to community providers, as well as provide health and wellness services. It also addresses a barrier that exists for many institutions, in that they may not know what resources exist in their communities or may not have arrangements with community mental health and substance use treatment resources to serve their students in need.