GUEST COLUMN: Mental health, deeper happiness and the University’s mission

Supporting student mental health is not a new concern for the University of North Carolina. The University’ 1789 charter — its earliest mission, in a sense — is to “consult the Happiness of a rising generation.” The founders of our state’s public universities believed that a good education isn’t just about sharing knowledge; our job is to help students build thriving, meaningful lives.

That’s what the old-school version of happiness means. Not simply feeling good in the moment, but having a secure sense of belonging and purpose. Creating healthy relationships, finding a cause or a profession that matters to you, honing the skills to cope with difficulty and make a difference in the world — all of those things take time, and college is supposed to offer the space and encouragement to make those big leaps into adulthood.

I was glad to see the special edition of student newspapers focused on student mental health published across North Carolina last month. The wellbeing of students is central to our mission, and raising the alarm about rising rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness among young people is hugely important work.

It was especially heartening to see student advocates focused on solutions to the problem. Over the last few years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNC System has added tens of millions of dollars in counseling resources, 24-hour crisis hotlines and expanded training to help students who are facing mental health challenges. Those investments have made a real difference for students, and we’ll continue doing everything we can to make more help available to those in need.

But it’s also clear that improving the long-term outlook for mental health will require some deeper changes in the social, cultural and technological environment we’ve created for young people. I am very persuaded by the work of researchers like Jonathan Haidt, the NYU social scientist who believes that a “phone-based childhood” has done tremendous damage to the psychological health of our students.

With the average American teenager spending close to nine hours per day looking at a screen, it’s no surprise that many students feel anxious, distracted and disconnected from real-world relationships. Every minute spent doom scrolling is a minute you don’t spend sleeping, reading, talking to friends, going outside or preparing for class. There’s plenty of evidence that daily exposure to the tragedies, outrages and raw social comparison of online life is bad for people. That’s one of the reasons we took steps last month to ban some of the worst actors of the social media world — anonymous gossip apps like YikYak and Sidechat — from campus networks.

College is supposed to be a place of real-world connection with friends, professors and mentors. It’s meant to be a time for encountering new ideas, discovering new ways of living and reflecting on the values you want to live by. I remember how unsettling it felt when I first arrived in Chapel Hill as a student from a small town, how nervous I was about making friends and finding my place in a bigger world. It’s normal, rational even, to be anxious in the face of those big uncertainties.

It gets easier when you realize that everyone around you is in the same boat, struggling with the daily pressures and epic questions about what comes next. A healthy campus culture emphasizes those common bonds and helps people find support in one another. A supportive environment helps us understand that the hard moments aren’t forever and that your struggles are a small part of a larger and more hopeful story. That’s the university I want for all of us, and it’s going to take all of us to build it.