More UW students are seeking mental health care, but not all campuses have enough staff to take care of them. Key findings from a the Center’s collaborative project with a UW-Madison journalism class.

About this story
Jenny Peek and Kate Prengaman reported this story with other journalism students in a UW-Madison class taught by Professor Deborah Blum, in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium, which includes Midwestern university journalism professors and students working on news projects in the public [...]

A decade ago, Thomas Murphy was a college dropout who used alcohol and drugs to deal with undiagnosed depression. Therapy made the difference for him. But he can’t receive it at school. When he re-enrolled at UW-Madison and went to the counseling center, he walked out with no appointment and a list of referrals.

Murphy’s story underscores a national dilemma: a surge in students seeking intensive counseling and psychiatric care, which college mental health centers often lack resources to provide.

About this story
Jenny Peek and Kate Prengaman reported this story with other journalism students in a UW-Madison class taught by Professor Deborah Blum, in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium, which includes Midwestern university journalism professors and students working on news projects in the public [...]

Five years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had the worst mental health care of any four-year UW institution, by some measures. But the university has worked to improve it.

The University of Wisconsin-Stout had a problem, counseling director John Achter told the student association last year. Twenty-two percent more students were seeking counseling services than ever before, forcing patients to wait up to 26 days to be seen.
Presented with those numbers, the association designated enough money for Achter to hire a new counselor. But some UW counseling centers don’t track even basic information on patients.

Wisconsin is one of 13 states that automatically place 17-year-olds in the adult criminal justice system. In the past few years, nearly one-third of states have passed laws to keep more young offenders in the juvenile justice system. But not Wisconsin.

In interviews with mental health advocates and county and state officials, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found that Wisconsin’s public mental health system — once viewed as a national model — has become fragmented and underfunded. And many experts fear that as Gov. Scott Walker moves to close the state’s budget deficit, the mental health system will be weakened even further.