Mental health articles

Subject though it is to numerous other infl uences, academic performance is
at once a consistent outcome, sensitive indicator, and solid predictor of emotional
well-being at all stages of development. Hence, the eff ective college
mental health practitioner conceives the task of promoting students’ academic
performance as just one aspect of enriching their educational and personal
experience and hence improving the quality of their lives. Th is broad aim may
seem at loggerheads with students’ sometimes explicit, oft en narrower, and
more pragmatic goals: to improve their grades, gain recognition from faculty,
or get into prestigious postgraduate programs. Yet, psychotherapy reveals that
most students know that their performance is an intrinsic aspect of who they
are as individuals and how they approach making sense of life experience.
Achievement motivation is a universal human striving, in that the eff ort
at competent and eff ective behavior is fundamental to the human spirit
(Basch, 1988; Heath, 1965; McClelland, 1961; White, 1963). Many progressive
societies capitalize on this striving and instantiate it through a meritocracy,
rewarding eff ective achievement as defi ned by external standards.
Such societies promote early socialization of children’s achievement through
competitive rating systems that compare children and hold them to the
same standards. Th is approach can have well-known and well-documented
consequences for children whose skills vary from or are delayed relative
to other children: negative self-evaluation; painful feelings; self-fulfi lling
prophecies of future failure; and a consequent “downward-mobility” drift
toward underperformance and inadequate educational, and perhaps later
career, achievement (Vaillant, 1977).
Loving parents and supportive teachers can to some extent off set the
impact of these negative early educational experiences. Once children develop
and are reinforced for their own unique skills and talents in other areas, some
negative psychological consequences of early underperformance—particularly
poor self-image, evaluation anxiety, and self-blaming depressive reactions—
can be further obviated. Yet it does not take searching questioning of many college students to uncover their continuing pain and self-recrimination for
academic underperformance.
Insofar as academic achievement is both a cause and a consequence of
emotional well-being, college counselors or psychotherapists need to address
underperformance through both direct strategies and interventions for the
many emotional and psychosocial diffi culties that infl uence achievement.
Th ey treat “whole persons” of interlocking and interacting components—
cognitive, emotional, psychosocial, psychosexual, and spiritual aspects of
self; as well as academic, athletic, social, and extracurricular aspects of college
life. Th ese elements bear either parallel or complementary/compensatory
relationships with each other. In the case of parallel eff ects, students’ diffi culties
in one area emerge as diffi culties in others; depression, for instance, has a
uniformly negative impact on functioning in all areas. In the case of complementary
and compensatory eff ects, altered functioning in one area may eff ect
seismic shift s in others: students’ overdevotion to athletic involvement may
impair academic performance and restrict social life to sports buddies. Student
problems therefore call for a range of interventions that aff ect diverse
realms of college experience.