Reframing the Conversation on College Student Mental Health

The expression "mental health" has become ubiquitous when discussing college students' lived experiences. While effective, this expression has not, problematically, been deconstructed. In this article, we explore what "mental health" means. Through doing so we identify three unintended effects embedded within its usage: (a) symptoms should be relieved and not understood as meaningful; (b) health refers to objective functioning alone; and (c) expert authority should be emphasized at the cost of local communities. Accordingly, we argue for the importance of resisting the unreflective usage of this term and creating spaces to reframe the conversations, which engages complexity, subjective meaning, and ambiguity.