Week one of college, my son fatally overdosed. Schools must try to stop similar tragedies.
Dropping a son or daughter off at college for their first year is a rite of passage — a special time of transition that combines separation, love, anxiety and excitement. But it’s also fraught with risk.
My family experienced the pain of this transition gone wrong, with the loss of our son Jonathan to a drug overdose during his first week of college. We are immensely grateful that his school — the University of Denver — has since tackled this problem head-on in order to reduce the risk for other families.
As the days count down for this year’s crop of freshmen to be dropped off by their proud parents, it’s a good time to ask the institution to which they will be entrusted how it supports students in recovery from substance dependence.
Six things for schools to consider
Many parents will recoil from such a suggestion, believing that addiction only affects other families. Indeed, most first-year — and returning — students at our institutions of higher learning do not have a problem with substance abuse. But the question is important for six very important reasons:
1. Parental awareness. It’s entirely possible that parents simply don’t know, or are in denial, that their son or daughter has become dependent on alcohol or drugs. Many parents are aware of, and some even tolerate, some level of experimentation while their kids are in high school. A substantial percentage of our kids have done so. But, as anyone in recovery can tell you, when people become substance-dependent, they become extremely deceptive — to both themselves and to those around them — about what’s really going on in their lives. Couple this with parents’ natural confirmation bias (believing what they want to believe), and it is entirely possible that there is a preexisting-but-undetected problem. A student might actually enter school needing a recovery program from Day One.
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2. The paths to college dependence. A young person can become dependent after entering college along one of three pathways. It can be a rapid process for someone treated with opioids for an injury or a medical or dental procedure, especially if they have a genetic proclivity. Additionally, given the large number of freshmen entering college with some type of mental health challenge (such as mild or moderate anxiety or depression), coupled with the stress levels imposed by a higher level of academics, it’s easy for a student to fall into self-medication using drugs. Finally, while partying has gone hand-in-hand with academics on campuses for decades, the drugs to which kids are exposed today are much stronger than the ones their parents might have used. People are even more susceptible when two of these factors converge. Regardless of the pathway, a student can fall into a condition where a recovery program becomes necessary.
3. Facilitated support. The well-publicized presence of a college recovery program presents the opportunity for a student who is not dependent on drugs or alcohol to help someone who is. College roommates and fraternity or sorority members get to know each other extremely well, both personally and through social media. They grow to care for one another and often have the opportunity to urge a friend in need to seek help. The presence of a recovery program further enables this type of noble and courageous support.
4. Recovery from traumatic events. Whenever a student perishes on campus — for any reason — it’s a shocking event for the entire student body, including those who did not even know the student who died. Recovery programs are a vital tool to help avoid the disaster of a fatal drug overdose and the subsequent ripple of anxiety across a campus. Parents should be invested in ensuring that their child’s potential for exposure to such shocks is minimized, to say nothing of genuinely caring for the well-being of the campus family.
5. Rejection of stigma. The presence of a recovery program is a good indication of whether the institution really cares for its students. College recovery programs are found at schools whose administrations are wise enough to have conquered their own stigma over having a program, and who are truly looking out for the best interests of all their students. These schools resist a natural aversion to posters or signs publicizing their recovery programs out of concern that parents of potential students touring their school might think the campus has a drug problem. Rather, they realize that enlightened parents — hopefully including those reading this column — will be thankful that a school cares enough to maintain such a program. For colleges, these programs can help pay for themselves through lower drop-out rates and higher graduation rates.
6. Campuswide awareness. The best collegiate recovery programs are overt and highly visible to undergraduates. Students attending these schools quickly accept them, and in the process become naturally conditioned to overcome their own stigma toward those afflicted with substance abuse disorder. Upon graduation, they become better citizens, who can help our nation overcome the mistaken notion that addiction is a moral failing rather than a disease, like diabetes.
You can help create the solution with one single step
Higher education pays attention to what parents — and donors — demand. Do your child (and his or her classmates) a favor and pointedly ask: Our child is fine, but we want to know whether you have a collegiate recovery program. If not, why not? If so, how good is it?
Even better, if your child is a rising high school senior performing the ritual of college campus tours, quietly ask these same questions wherever you go. You should rest a bit easier with a good answer — and you should consider avoiding colleges or universities that dodge the question.
Retired Admiral James A. Winnefeld Jr. is the co-founder, with his wife Mary, of S.A.F.E. Project US, an organization dedicated to reversing the nation’s addiction fatality epidemic.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How colleges and universities can combat the opioid overdose epidemic
