The national mental health crisis plaguing colleges is stretching disability support offices, where more students are registering psychological disorders to receive classroom accommodations. The University of California, San Francisco, recently made a new accommodation available to students with disabilities: “release time” to attend medical appointments. Like many postsecondary institutions around the country, UCSF is seeing a spike in students registering with disability services to receive accommodations for mental health conditions. At UCSF, which enrolls about 3,200 students in health-related professional and graduate programs, about 14.5 percent of students are registered with disability services, Montgomery said. Nearly 70 percent of those are new to his office.
