Wisconsin Watch Media Partners Center (https://partners.wisconsinwatch.org/series/campus-mental-health/)
Jenny Peek and Kate Prengaman reported this story with other journalism students in a UW-Madison class taught by Professor Deborah Blum, in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium, which includes Midwestern university journalism professors and students working on news projects in the public interest. The Consortium is supported by a grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. Read the IJEC consortium stories
Other UW-Madison journalism students contributing to this report were Anna Bukowski, Gayle Cottrill, Monica Hickey, Thomas Mitchell, Daniel Rose and Sam Zastrow.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison University Health Services has received a $306,000 grant for campus suicide prevention programs from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
This interactive map summarizes mental health services at the 13 four-year campuses in University of Wisconsin System. Click on each campus to view a window with a campus-specific summary. Information was obtained from open records requests, interviews of counseling staff and extensive reviews of the campus counseling centers’ websites.
A decade ago, Thomas Murphy was a college dropout who used alcohol and drugs to deal with undiagnosed depression. Therapy made the difference for him. But he can’t receive it at school. When he re-enrolled at UW-Madison and went to the counseling center, he walked out with no appointment and a list of referrals.
Murphy’s story underscores a national dilemma: a surge in students seeking intensive counseling and psychiatric care, which college mental health centers often lack resources to provide.