Book Review: Mental Health and Student Conduct Issues on the College Campus

PROSPECT, Conn. - Aug. 9, 2016 - PRLog -- For decades, Gerald Amada has been a prolific contributor to college mental health. The founder and for 30 years a director of the mental health program of the City College or San Francisco, he has lectured at over 150 colleges and universities, was book review editor and on the editorial board of this journal, and published twelve books and over 90 articles {not to mention two novels and his dog's autobiography!). And now a chronically arranged collection of his writings from 1975 to 2015, an "omnibus of articles" (yes, that's how he writes), has been published. In the interests of disclosure I should note that he and I have occasionally and amicably worked together, and so in proposing to review his book I hoped to say nice things. Happily after reading it, I can do so with a clear conscience, both on its merits and for what it represents.

Let me start by addressing the obvious question of relevance. So much has happened on campus and in society over the last 40 years that it's natural to wonder if his long-ago articles are dated. And it's true, you won't find anything here about, for example, social media, Tide IX, soaring student debt, microaggressions, threat assessment committees, electronic health records, or mindfulness meditation. Yet for all that is missing ! was struck by how much still applies. Consider these dark assertions: "Over the last several years, college personnel throughout the nation have found themselves faced with an increasing number of disruptive students" (p. 84). "There are several reasons for the burgeoning numbers of [seriously emotionally disturbed] students now attending colleges and universities" (p. 85). These sentences could be cut and pasted into a journal article today and, just guessing, well into the future, yet Amada wrote them 30 years ago, in 1986. This book offers evidence—whether reassuring or not, readers can decide—that if it seems these days student psychopathology is on the rise, well, it's seemed that way for a very long time.

The most frequently discussed topic in these pages, Amada's special area of expertise, is how to manage disruptive students. From 1986 to 2007, he has urged all who would listen to focus on code of conduct violations and disciplinary sanctions, and leave underlying psychopathology out of it. Discipline, he explains, is not punishment but an educational tool teaching the consequences of misbehavior, and it serves to protect the rights of the community—roommates, classmates, and instructors. But too often administrators and instructors want to be nice or avoid upsetting disturbed students or, the ugly truth, shirk responsibility, and so treat disruptions as a mental health problem rather than a behavioral problem. This is a big mistake for all concerned, Amada insists. Psychologizing misbehavior fails to teach misbehaving students the consequences ot their actions, leaves community members in the lurch, and turns counselors into disciplinary agents.

In theory, Amada makes a convincing case for separating the counseling relationship from disciplinary responses, a principle consistent with the International Association of Counseling Services (2010) standards: "it is critically important that the [counseling] service be administratively neutral" (p. 2), In practice, of course, disruptive students often thwart the best-laid disciplinary plans and are unable or unwilling to appreciate sanctions' supposed educational benefits. Short of kicking a student out of school, legally a last resort, colleges often just have to muddle through in these cases, with many offices sucked in, counseling centers too. Amada's prescriptions are conceptually helpful but aspirational.

In addition to conduct issues, Amada's curious eye alights on a wide assortment of subjects, among them selecting interns; humor in therapy, outreach to Chinese students, institutional resistances to counseling centers, and mismanaged drug treatment. He has insightful things to say about all of these topics. An interesting autobiographical piece charts his "professional odyssey" from accounting major to psychology major and his dawning appreciation of Freud, object relations, self psychology, and feminist theory. One of my favorite pieces is a nifty book chapter on the treatment of anxiety. Mind you, I was the coauthor.

Amada is not one to mince words. By his own admission, "the main emotional wellspring for my writings is anger," and indeed he can be tough on his targets. Thus, administrators who insist on mandatory counseling are "benighted." The Virginia Tech instructors and administrators who "coddled" Seung-Hui Cho, the already out-of-control future mass shooter, "collectively lapsed into a veritable state of bureaucratic paralysis and laissez-fairism" (p, 334). "The haphazard, thoughtless and offhanded way in which psychiatric drugs are usually prescribed is a national tragedy and disgrace" (p. 312). Based on personal experience Jem- is a pleasant fellow, with a dry humor that is also displayed in this book, but it doesn't sound like it would be much fun taking him on in an argument.

In the end, what I value about this as much as the particular writings is the fact of its existence. When before has a clinician's writings been honored with a career-spanning collection? To the of my knowledge, the answer is never. If we college clinicians take our work seriously, consider it rich and complex, care to learn about the evolving perspective of an expert colleague, then our field deserves compilations like this one. The publication of Mental Health and Student Conduct Issues on the College Campus is a welcome development in the college mental health literature.

Paul Grayson, PhD
Director, Counseling and Wettness Center, Marymount Manhattan College

For more information visit: http://biopub.us/amada.htm