The severity of mental health issues among college students has increased over the past few years, having a significant negative impact on not only their academic performance but also on their families and even society as a whole. Therefore, one of the pressing issues facing college administrators right now is finding a method that is both scientific and useful for determining the mental health of college students. In pace with the advancement of Internet technology, the Internet has become an important communication channel for contemporary college students. As one of the main forces in the huge Internet population, college students are at the stage of growing knowledge and being most enthusiastic about new things, and they like to express their opinions and views on study life and social issues and are brave to express their emotions. These subjective text data often contain some affective tendencies and psychological characteristics of college students, and it is beneficial to dig out their affective tendencies to further understand what they think and expect and to grasp their mental health as early as possible. In order to address the issue of assessing the mental health of college students, this study makes an effort to use public opinion data from the university network and suggests a college student sentiment analysis model based on the OCC affective cognitive model and Bi-LSTM neural network. In order to label three different types of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment on the microblog text of college network public opinion, we first design a sentiment rule system based on the OCC affective cognition elicitation mechanism. In order to effectively and automatically identify the sentiment state of college students in the network public opinion, this study uses a Bi-LSTM neural network to classify the preprocessed college network public opinion data. Finally, this study performs comparison experiments to confirm the validity of the Bi-LSTM neural network sentiment recognition algorithm and the accuracy of the OCC sentiment rule labeling system. The findings show that the college student sentiment recognition effect of the model is significantly enhanced when the OCC sentiment rule system is used to label the college network public opinion data set as opposed to the naturally labeled data set. In contrast to SVM and other classification models like CNN and LSTM, the Bi-LSTM neural network-based classification model achieves more satisfactory classification results in the recognition of college opinion sentiment.