Many Burdens to Bear: Culture, Mental Health, and the Overlooked Diversity in Undergraduates’ Help-Seeking Strategies

• In Event: 104 - Section on Sociology of Mental Health Paper Session. New Dimensions of Difference: Underexplored Variation in Mental Health

Abstract

What are the overlooked obstacles to mental health support? Existing explanations of mental health help-seeking predict classed obstacles to care in college. Instead of studying mental health help-seeking as a distinct pattern of behavior, however, I foreground a cultural analysis that explores how undergraduates’ mental health help-seeking strategies are nested within their larger cultural repertoire engaging college officials. Employing 137 interviews with undergraduates and two years of ethnographic observation at an elite university, I show how undergraduates with disparate precollege experiences differ in their strategies toward mental health help-seeking and how their motivations for seeking help or not align with their general proclivity or reluctance to engage college officials. Whereas middle-class undergraduates report being at ease when engaging college officials, undergraduates from working-class backgrounds are split. The Privileged Poor—lower-income undergraduates who attend boarding, day, and preparatory high schools—enter college with cultural repertoires akin to those of their middle-class peers, are primed to engage college officials, and are proactive in doing so. By contrast, the Doubly Disadvantaged—lower-income undergraduates who remain tied to their home communities and schools before college—are defensive when engaging college officials and withdraw from them. Through documenting the overlooked heterogeneity, I outline how precollege experiences have lasting influence on undergraduates’ cultural repertoires that is independent of family background. Consequently, I shed new light on the cultural underpinnings of education processes and the reproduction of inequality in college that results from uneven access to institutional resources via college officials like mental health support and treatment.

Author

• Anthony Abraham Jack, Harvard University