A Step to Help Parents

The article on parental notification of mental-health issues (On the Campus, Sept. 12) neglects key distinctions and implies that the University is doing all it can to help parents help their children.

Unstated is that there is a vast difference — in kind, not degree — between temporary or situational depression and anxiety, and serious mental illness (SMI). SMIs, including clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, are life-threatening and commonly manifest themselves in early adulthood. Parental awareness of deteriorating health can be crucial to helping a son or daughter find a path forward. Princeton should make every effort to help parents know when major changes in thought and behavior are occurring. A protocol that notifies parents only after a hospitalization is inadequate, as thousands of families have learned. 

CPS Director Calvin Chin’s statement that “usually, students will be open about whether they are feeling sad or anxious or overwhelmed” is a misleading generalization. People with SMI often deny that anything is wrong, that they have stopped taking medication, or that they have suicidal thoughts. Unless parents can talk with advisers, counselors, physicians, and faculty, they may receive too little information, too late.

There is something the University can do. It can send every incoming freshman a confidentiality-waiver form for parental access to medical information. The form can include an explanation for the waiver’s purpose, as well as a box that can be checked to decline to grant the waiver. Submission of the form must be required for matriculation. This system would dramatically increase the number of students who allow their families to be kept abreast of important mental-health issues.