In the wake of the Jan. 8 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others by Jared Loughner, news media has focused its 24-hour lens on how college campuses handle mentally disturbed students.
We’ve all heard the story by now:
Loughner was “creepy” in class, according to some of his peers and instructors at Pima Community College, who complained to administration. After several incidents alerted campus police to Loughner, the school found online videos he’d posted in late September containing vague threats on the college. School officials suspended Loughner until he’d undergone a mental health exam to prove he wasn’t dangerous. Instead, the troubled student left PCC for good and, well, you know the rest.
All this transpired in Tucson, AZ, less than 100 miles from ASU. Is it possible to know how this scenario would have played out in Tempe, or at the West, Downtown or Polytechnic campuses?
In phone and e-mail interviews, school officials would not speculate about how a hypothetical Loughner-like scenario would be handled at ASU. Barbara Meehan, assistant director of counseling services, says only that “concerns are addressed on a case by case, individual basis.”
While Meehan says there’s no “template” for identifying a student who may be developing mental health problems, she stresses that anyone can look for red flags that someone might need counseling or support — things like sudden changes in behavior, academics or personal hygiene, as well as “bizarre, alarming statements.”
No data could be obtained on how many outbursts or disturbed students ASU Counseling Services responds to. But a student who witnessed such an incident in class two years ago shared her experience with SPM.
Everyone was sitting in a circle, says 22-year-old English senior Anna Bethancourt — as usual for the literature course’s discussions — when one student started “acting really excited.”
A normally quiet kid, Bethancourt says the boy’s behavior was obviously out of character. He was talking rapidly, moving around the room and “wasn’t really making a whole lot of sense.” She and the other students either laughed or didn’t react, because they did not understand what was going on.
“At first, I just thought, ‘Oh man, this kid is really embarrassing himself,’” she says. “My first instinct wasn’t to think there was a mental health issue, but that he was being ridiculous.”
Then, Bethancourt says, things escalated when the student started to write a mathematical formula of the universe on the class’s chalkboard while he “rapidly switched between topics,” like literature, Jesus and other things unrelated to course work.
About this time, Bethancourt says, she saw the class instructor take out her cell phone. Shortly after, the instructor asked the distressed student to step outside and talk privately for a moment. When the teacher returned a few minutes later, she explained to the class that she’d called Counseling and Consultation Services to take the student away for evaluation, reminding the class that counseling is available for all students.
Bethancourt says she appreciated the way the instructor handled the incident discreetly, mindful of both the class’s safety and that student’s privacy. It can be harder for peers to confront a troubled classmate even if nobody feels threatened, she says, which may hurt that student in the end.
Bethancourt, who’s worked as a life success coach on the Tempe campus for three semesters and received some training in mental health evaluation from ASU Counseling and Consultation, says it’s important for a college campus to keep itself safe from violent students, but that the focus should be to better connect and inform people about available services.
In the end, this may be the hardest part of handling mental health issues in an university setting. The students are adults and responsible for themselves, but the university is responsible for keeping its community members and property safe. ASU can provide resources and draft protocol, but ideally “it’s just a matter of encouraging the person to go there themselves,” Bethancourt says, “and I don’t know how much the university [can do] in terms of making them do that.”
She says the universities and their faculties aren’t ultimately responsible for violent acts like those seen in Tucson with Jared Loughner, so schools shouldn’t overreact and start punishing students who might just need help.
“I’d be really disappointed” if her classmate had been punished, Bethancourt says, because he “was not a danger. There was no weapon, no threats. It would be difficult to justify punishing him, because he clearly just needed counseling.”
Still, given her own experience two years ago, Bethancourt says: “I think teachers should have a plan for when something like that happens.”
All faculty are instructed to call Campus Counseling Services or campus police if a similar situation occurs, says ASU psychology professor Manuel Barrera, but further training in how to determine the threat level of a strangely behaving student is “neither required nor routinely offered” for ASU faculty.
Barrera, who’s taught at ASU for 34 years, says he’s never needed to make such a call, but still understands the feelings of confusion and indecision experienced by Bethancourt and her classmates.
“It’s easy to imagine that if this happened in my classroom, I might react as ‘Excuse me? Is this real?’” he says. “So much judgment goes into that decision — I have no idea how I’d react.”
Barrera, also a clinical psychologist, says he can identify the warning signs of deep psychological issues, but asks: “If I was a biochemistry teacher, or economics [teacher] or something, would I have the training to be able to determine whether a person is violent or not? I don’t know.”
That’s the key distinction for schools as they determine how to deal with abnormal behavior, Barrera says — whether it’s violent or not.
People with “thought disorders” are not actually at elevated risk to harm others, he says, but whenever news media leeches onto a story like Loughner’s, many people may view those with mental health problems as more dangerous.
Barrera says from what he’s heard of the case, Pima Community College’s actions were appropriate: “They basically said, ‘Stay away from campus until you demonstrate to us as fit to return. Our students and faculty are feeling uncomfortable.’”
Still, he says, it “would probably be wise by the university” to do their own mental health evaluation rather than ask for someone else’s.
And as for how other university campuses might handle their mental health problems in the wake of Jared Loughner’s much-publicized case: “If there’s anything positive that grows out of tragedy, it’s the potential for greater understanding, and learning for events in the future,” Barrera says.
Anyone concerned about a student’s behavior can contact an ASU counseling service, located on all four campuses. Other resources include the Student Assistance Coordination Committee (SACC), which coordinates emergency responses to campus incidents involving ASU students, and the 24-hour EMPACT hotline, a dedicated ASU crisis line: 480-921-1006.
Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.
