College Stress Survival Guide
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LITERARY RESOURCES COLUMN
College Stress Survival Guide The Stressed Years of Their Lives. Helping Your Kid Survive and Thrive During Their College Years. By B. Janet Hibbs and Anthony Rostain; St. Martin’s Press; New York, New York; 2019; ISBN 9781250113139; pp. 322; $ 28.99 (hardcover) Richard Balon 1 Received: 30 September 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 # Academic Psychiatry 2020
College education is a very stressful affair for young adults and their parents, starting with the selection of a specific college and the focus of education, and continuing with management of financing, followed by the child’ departure, that is, the child’s physical and psychological separation from the family. Yet, these stressors are just the beginning for some students and families, as not all students are well prepared to leave home. Some of them are not emotionally resilient and cannot easily cope with suddenly failing a class, not being at the top of their class, or having to organize their studies on their own. Adding to this mix is the fact that these events all happen during late adolescence, euphemistically called early adulthood (or emerging adulthood as mentioned in this book), with all its emotional turmoil and during the time when many mental disorders start. No wonder that, as the authors of The Stressed Years of Their Lives, Janet Hibbs and Anthony Rostain, note, many students are caught in “the epidemic of college age mental health problems” (p. 4). They are not prepared for the roller coaster of college life and “for the removal of home’s invisibly embedded emotional and cognitive scaffolding” (p. 5). Their parents are not prepared for their children’s experience as well. Parents hope for college to be their children’s best years of their life, yet they start to see “poor coping, anxiety, depression or emotional upheaval” (p. 4). Seeing the dramatic rise in mental illness and other problems in college-aged students, Drs. Hibbs and Rostain, experts on late adolescent psychiatry and family psychiatry, wrote a guide on how to cope with the stress of the college years. Their writings, as they mention, are drawn on three wells of knowledge: scientific literature; interviews with students, parents,
* Richard Balon [email protected] 1
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
high school principals, and college mental health personnel; and their decades of clinical experience helping young people. Their book is intended mostly for parents, but it can be of use to the entire family and others. It is composed of two parts: Part One, “Of Stress and Resilience,” focusing on readiness and early identification of barriers to success, and Part Two, “Of Crisis and Recovery,” discussing the lives of students and parents as they face both normative development and mental health concerns. The first chapter, “On Fault Lines in the World of Today’s Youth,” outlines the issues faced by students and their parents, including the “gloomy forecast of increased competition and narrowing possibilities (“The college degree is becoming the n
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