Co-written by Dan Simons and Julie Baron.

The current playbook of academic institutions striving to provide mental health support for students is not working. While many campuses have funded additional mental health care through their counseling centers, not enough is being done to reach students more comprehensively. Instead, or really in addition, academic institutions should play to their strength — affecting students in the classroom. This is where topics and discussions about mental health can be brought out from the shadows and normalized.

Parents and other caring adults have worked hard at setting teens up for success and still hear the worrisome pronouncements from college students:

Social media threads on the parent pages of hundreds of institutions with thousands of posts and comments of worried parents are pleading:

According to the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, 36% of college students (and almost 60% of gender nonconforming and trans-identifying students) reported being diagnosed with anxiety, and 28% report being diagnosed with depression, which does not include the additional reports of students suffering with other mental health disorders.[1] There is an even wider subset who have no formal mental health diagnosis yet suffer in silence without seeking support. These vulnerabilities create an........

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