FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. NORMALITY IS DEPRAVITY.

The house organ for All Woke Things Considered discovers an unintended consequence of social distancing.

LGBTQ+ college students face “sizable” mental health challenges compared to their heterosexual and cisgender peers, according to a new report by the Proud & Thriving Project.

The study found that LGBTQ+ students experience a higher incidence of substance misuse, depression, suicidal ideation and academic and extracurricular disengagement than their non-LGBTQ+ peers.

The Proud & Thriving Project, a collaboration between the Jed Foundation, the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals and other groups, surveyed 907 high school and college students -- 602 LGBTQ+ and 305 non-LGBTQ+ -- with college students making up two-thirds of the participants. The group separately surveyed 194 college, high school and middle school counselors and administrators.

Oberlin is probably a better place than Shutter Island if your mind's not right.

The pandemic only exacerbated these discrepancies, the report found. Nearly all the counselors and administrators surveyed said that COVID-19 worsened symptoms of depression, anxiety, loneliness and difficulty coping with stress among LGBTQ+ students. Eighty-six percent named anxiety as the top-presenting issue among the LGBTQ+ students they served over the past six months, 84 percent cited depression and 75 percent listed “family concerns” -- including fear of coming out and acceptance of their identity -- as the biggest concern among their LGBTQ+ students.

Sofia Pertuz, senior adviser at the Jed Foundation, noted that some LGBTQ+ students who returned home during the pandemic struggled with finding a private space to talk about their mental health issues -- especially if they weren’t out to their family. Additionally, some LGBTQ+ students who didn’t have health insurance couldn’t access outside mental health practitioners for services that they received in person from their institutions, which especially impacted BIPOC LGBTQ+ students.

“Colleges, specifically, were safe havens for many LGBTQ+ students because they found LGBTQ+ centers for schools that had them, or they had designated roles, or they had an office of diversity and inclusion where they felt like someone was trying to help,” said Pertuz.

To be sure, where LGBTQ+ students attend college greatly impacts their experience. Half of the students surveyed reported that their high school, college or university is a top LGBTQ+-affirming space. But the report found that students in states that lack protections for LGBTQ+ individuals experienced additional stress and felt less supported by their institutions.

The people who used to inhabit Shutter Island don't have those resources, but they always have San Francisco.  "The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals, the closure of psychiatric hospitals begins after World War II. It accelerates under President John Kennedy. … It was progressives who led the charge to empty the mental hospitals. The promise was we would have community-based care. That was never built."  That's from an article about a different problem.  Read it on your own time.

In higher education, it looks like the diversity hustlers want to reframe abnormal psychology.

Last month, Middlebury College hired Alberto Soto to serve as its Director of Counseling. In an interview Soto told The Middlebury Campus that “source of all our psychic suffering,” are “whiteness, heteronormativity,” and “patriarchal systems”.

“The body and mind cannot be healed solely by self-care and focusing on surviving,” Soto told the student newspaper. “At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”

Never mind that in a few thousand years maybe we got a few things right, and coming up with pejorative labels for institutions that confer evolutionary advantage might not be as productive as, oh, coming to some understanding of why mental health challenges might come in bundles.  Or why Middlebury might be mistaken for an asylum.  ("A number of articles have been published in Middlebury’s student paper detailing the difficulties its community faces with regards to mental health.")

Meanwhile, at Woke Central, Steven Mintz raises good questions.

Does the term “pregnant person” show respect for transgendered people, or is this an example of political correctness run amuck?

Then there’s the use of new gender or sexual pronouns, which grows out of students’ demand to have their personal identities recognized, but also to “denormalize” conventional categories (for instance, through the use of a term like cisgender).

Concept creep is yet another source of controversy.

Alongside cost-push inflation, demand-pull inflation, built-in inflation, stagflation, and grade and credentials inflation, we have yet another kind of inflation in our society:  semantic.  This is the application of terms relating to harm, like trauma, or oppression, like triggering and bullying, to interpersonal interactions.

In the eyes of critics, concept creep weaponizes language, using words to stigmatize, call out, and assert power.

There is a way out.

In matters of language, I’m a proponent of what I regard as “common sense” or what use to be called civility.  To be civil is to be courteous, respectful, gracious, sensitive, and considerate.  That’s a form of virtue ethics that campuses, in particular, should cultivate.

But our campuses should also cultivate a love of written and spoken language, whether formal or vernacular or novel or traditional.  The more whimsical, edgy, vigorous, or evocative the better, from my point of view.

That requires, though, the Morale Conditioners to defer to the proper stewards of campus discourse.

I find it odd that some of our society’s most heated debates – for example, about cancel culture or Critical Race Theory or language usage – are, for the most part, not taking place in the classroom.  Is it because these debates strike instructors as too political or too volatile?  Or is it because of higher education’s overemphasis on a rather narrow definition of disciplinarity?

These are precisely the timely topics we should discuss, dispute, and debate.  Isn’t that what a college campus is for?

I hope so.