Psychiatric Disabilities in Postsecondary Education

Issue: An unprecedented and growing number of postsecondary students report psychiatric disabilities. How can postsecondary personnel support the success of these students? Defining the Issue A significant development in the field of postsecondary disability supports in the last decade has been the proliferation of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. This phe-nomenon has emerged at a pace that one observer characterized as a “rising tide ” (Eu-daly, 2002). Measel (1998) found that within one year, five institutions in the Big Ten Conference encountered an increase from 30 % to 100 % in the number of students served with psychiatric disabilities. At one institution, the University of Minnesota, the number of students reporting a psychiatric disability as their primary disability (285) was more than the combination of students reporting learning disabilities and attention deficit disorders (269). Although there is little systematically collected data to provide a reliable estimate of the emergence of psychiatric disabilities in postsec