(The following is from an address being this week at the American college Health Association's annual meeting in Washington, D.C., by Stanley H. King, director of research at UHS. The slides are not included.)

MANY COLLEGE students will use the services of a psychiatrist or psychologist during their undergraduate years, where such services are adequate and readily available. Delineation of the characteristics of students who are likely to seek psychological help can be useful to psychiatric and counseling services in planning for optimum care, both in terms of prevention and treatment. This paper-presents data on students who sought psychiatric help in college and compares them with students who did not receive such help.

The names of all students in the two panel survey samples who visited the Psychiatric Service of the University Health Services at any time during their undergraduate years were noted. The chief of the Psychiatric Service categorized each patient as to the type of disorder and listed the number of visits made to the Psychiatric Clinic. One question in the Final Questionnaire given in the senior year asked for information about psychiatric or counseling help from sources other than the University Health Services. The independent variables for this study thus consist of students who had psychiatric help from the University Health Services and from other sources. For comparison there are those students in the random samples who did not receive any psychiatric help. Slide I presents the distribution of these variables. The two classes are not different; approximately 20 percent of each sample received some kind of psychiatric help before graduation. The size of the sample and its randomness make it possible to generalize this percentage to the entire class as a reasonable approximation of the true rate.

Students who received psychiatric help were then compared with their classmates who received no help on a series of dependent variables. Data for these variables were gathered before or during the freshman year. We wished to determine what factors might be early indicators of the necessity for psychiatric help in terms of social demographic variables, personality characteristics, or various kinds of behavior. A practical matter was also involved. Over the four years there was a certain amount of attrition from the Study, either through leaving Harvard or through unwillingness to participate further in the research. The most complete data, therefore, exist for the freshman year.

A.S. Sophomores Seek No Help

Extent of participation in the Study is shown in Slide 2. For most of the variables to be considered in this paper, data are available on at least 90 per cent of the sample. The material in Slide 2 also brings out an interesting bit of information. Among the students who entered Harvard with advanced standing, that is, as sophomores, not a single one received psychiatric help during the three or four years of college.

The dependent variables have been organized for presentation here into three major groups: background characteristics, present behavior, and scores on personality tests.

Slide 3 lists a number of background characteristics, the majority of which did not differentiate between the group receiving psychiatric help and the controls. Among the variables that did discriminate between the groups, only three could be confirmed by testing on the Class of 1965. These were religious preference of the student, the number of close friends, and the student's evaluation of his past health.

Roman Catholics were the least likely to come for help, while those who stated their preference for a religious affiliation other than the common groups, or who stated they had no preference were most likely to come for help.

On the matter of close friends, the tendency was for students who stated they had none to be more likely to get help, while those who had many friends were less likely to come for help. The association was not as strong the second year but reached a statistically significant level when all categories above three friends were combined.

The third variable, evaluation of past health, showed that students who rated their past health as only fair or good were more likely to come for psychiatric help than those who rated it as excellent.

Among the factors which showed a statistically significant relationship for the Class of 1964 but could not be supported in the following year, mention might be made of the direction of the association. For political preference, students coming for psychiatric help were more likely to list none, independent, or other instead of the standard Republican or Democrat. In answer to the question, how frequently did you date last year, psychiatric patients were more inclined to indicate none or rarely. Students were also asked whether or not their parents were living together, and if not, with whom did the student live. Nine per cent of the Class of 1964 and 12 per cent of the Class of 1965 reported that their parents were not living together. In the first class a higher proportion of the psychiatric patients reported their parents were not living together than the control group, but this was not confirmed in the second class.

Even though data on satisfaction with secondary school are available on only one sample, that for the Class of 1965, the findings are given in slide 7. Dissatisfaction with secondary school was associated with the seeking of psychiatric help. There is good reason to suspect that the association in this table is not due to the one in a hundred chance probability, because satisfaction with the freshman year will prove important in the next section.

In summary, the majority of background factors showed no significant relationship with seeking psychiatric help, whether these factors were education, ethnic membership, region of the country, or intelligence and previous academic performance of the student.

Present Behavior