Suchergebnisse

Mental health has become a matter of growing concern on college campuses, and the coronavirus has only amplified these trends. Whether high rates of mental health issues were always present on college campuses but went undiagnosed or whether structural and cultural conditions have prompted a true rise in mental illness, the current prevalence of these issues remains troubling. Although counseling centers can play an important role in addressing these issues, instructors are often the first point of contact for students in need. Sociologists of mental health are in a position to offer insights for these instructors and to suggest avenues of response. Drawing on epidemiological evidence and buttressed by guidance from mental health practitioners who work in a college setting, I propose a set of "best practices" for instructors who wish to better support their students' mental flourishing.

Abstract
Women tend to be more vulnerable to the adverse psychological effects of "network events" (stressors that occur to loved ones). The cost-of-caring hypothesis is regarded as the primary mechanism for this vulnerability and posits that women's relatively high level of emotional involvement in the lives of network members causes women to experience greater empathetic reactions when loved ones encounter stressors. Drawing on the stress process model, gender theory, and research on the collateral consequences of incarceration, we theorize stress proliferation, the process by which an initial stressor induces secondary stressors, as an additional mechanism and empirically test our theoretical propositions using the case of African Americans with an incarcerated family member. Using data from the National Survey of American Life, we ask: are African American women more vulnerable to the depressive effects of familial incarceration compared to African American men? If so, to what extent might African American women's heightened vulnerability be explained by their greater susceptibility to stress proliferation? Results suggest that familial incarceration is associated with greater chronic strains, financial strain, and family conflict only among African American women. Further, the magnitude of the association between familial incarceration and depressive symptoms is significantly larger among African American women; however, after adjusting for stress proliferation variables, the gender difference in vulnerability attenuates and becomes statistically nonsignificant. We conclude that the emotional cost of caring may be compounded by social and economic costs of caregiving, heightening women's vulnerability to depression following disruptive network events.