4/25 – 5/1

Mental and Behavioral Health

The University of Maryland LGBT Equity Center and Counseling Center hosted a Mental Health & Self-Care in LGBTQ+ Communities discussion and demonstration last week, one of a series of events meant to foster discussion about mental health and self-care techniques held each semester.

According to Harvard University’s student newspaper, the Crimson, the Cambridge Police Department officers who forcibly arrested a Harvard student last month  “have yet to participate” in non-mandatory crisis intervention training meant to instruct officers how to manage situations involving mentally ill individuals. The 40-hour crisis training “supplements” the mandatory training officers receive every year. The training is not required, but CPD has committed to putting at least 10 percent of its officers through it.

Mind Matters, a student-led mental health advocacy group at Yale University, hosted the largest ever mental health event at the school. More than 500 Yale students attended Fresh Check Day, where student groups set up booths related to mental health and identity and provided information about the mental health resources available on campus.

The Texas A&M MSC Visual Arts Committee is sharing an art exhibit centered around conversations about mental health. The exhibit includes a variety of artwork created by fellow students from creative prose and poetry to sculpture and photography that focuses on telling an individual’s experience with mental health.

As rates of anxiety and stress continue to increase, some universities are turning their focus to the idea of “mindfulness” as a prevention strategy. Mindfulness encourages people to be present and aware in the moment, with the goal of calming the mind. Examples of schools incorporating mindfulness into their campus culture are rapidly emerging and include: The University of Minnesota which added designated meditation rooms to its dorms, the University of Vermont created a dorm dedicated to wellbeing, and Carnegie Mellon installed a mindfulness room.

Dr. Alfiee M. Breland-Noble, the director of the African American Knowledge Optimized for Mindfully Healthy Adolescents Project and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center gave a talk at Colgate University last month that focused on mental health for students of color.  The talk, called “College, Stress and #Beychella” mentioned a key insufficiency of the Colgate campus: the lack of individuals of color working at the university’s Counseling Center. Colgate freshman Jaritza Nuñez said of the lecture, “The health symposium was a great opportunity to discuss mental health in communities of color. I feel like mental health can often be ignored in our communities and speaking about it helps us see that there are others who struggle.”

Last week, an Oregon State University student experiencing a mental health crisis set a fire in his dorm room before jumping from the fifth floor window. He was taken to the hospital and as of Wednesday, was in stable condition.

At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, more services outside of the Counseling and Psychological Services are becoming available to assist students with mental health concerns. Student Resilience, a new program at the school that helps students overcome challenges or stress, will offer a peer-mentoring program to give students the opportunity to help one another with issues they are facing.

According to the University of Nebraska student newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, in 2016, 60 students were hospitalized for attempting to or planning to attempt suicide during that spring semester. A report in 2016 found that suicide attempts or ideations at the university rose 65 percent compared to the previous year. Students at UNL are actively trying to break the stigma surrounding mental health. Resources on campus include Active Minds, Out of the Darkness UNL, a student organization that hosts an annual suicide prevention walk to help raise money for those affected by depression, and Cultivate, a student-led campaign dedicated to helping students deal with stress in a healthy way.

New legislation passed by the Senate Education Committee in California would require California State University campuses to have at least one full time mental health counselor for every 1,000 students. “Counseling centers in the CSU are woefully and chronically understaffed,” says Mimi Bommersbach, a clinical psychologist at California State University, Chico.

Today, Delta Tau Delta and Talkspace, a global leader in online therapy, announced a partnership to provide online counseling to the fraternity’s 9,000+ members. It will enable the students to connect with Talkspace’s licensed counselors from the convenience of their smartphones. The collaboration brings a modern and student-friendly mental health solution to colleges across the country.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, the president of Macalester College, which recently lost a student to suicide, wrote, argued that we are living in an “age of anxiety” that he believes has been brought about by the increasing availability of firearms, the financial crisis, life in a post 911 world, and social media. According to Rosenberg, college leaders must take responsibility for the environment that has been created and ask what can be done to make it healthier for children now and in the future. He believes that leaders must build policies and practices around hope rather than fear, around trust rather than suspicion.

In the Rocky Mountain Collegian, an independent student newspaper at Colorado State University, student Lauren Willson writes that university facilities are unable to support the influx of patients, either due to long wait times or insufficient consistency in treatment sessions. Wilson suggests looking for solution beyond the counseling center; the CSU Health Network website lists resources for mental and emotional health, many of which are unaffiliated with the university. Additionally she suggests free assessments and self-check quizzes that can be found online and help in identifying issues.

Researchers at universities and companies are exploring how artificial intelligence might be used to help treat depression and other mental-health conditions. Woebot, a text-based chatbot has been studied to determine whether the tool can mirror the therapeutic process for depression. Critics have raised privacy concerns about the safety of emerging AI-powered mental-health tools and the sensitivity of the information being gathered, analyzed and recorded by these systems. Others have raised concerns about evaluating such apps thoroughly for negative impact. Adam Miner, an AI researcher and clinical psychologist at Stanford University said, “If the app doesn’t work, are people less likely to get the help they need?”

In an op-ed in the University of Georgia newspaper the Red and Black, Asher Beckner argues that the session limit at the school’s counseling and psychological services is harmful. According to Beckner, CAPS provides integral and necessary services to students, but the session limits and emphasis on solution-based therapy force many students to leave with lingering mental illnesses.

The sports psychology team under the Athletic Medicine department at the University of Nebraska is a second resource for athletes dealing with stress. The branch offers sports performance psychiatry, psychology and mental health services. The team has two counselors, which serve 744 athletes, meaning one counselor is available to about 370 student athletes, a stark contrast compared to CAPS, which has 18 counselors available to more than 26,000 students. Syracuse University Athletics has also made a full-time therapist available exclusively for student athletes.

Diversity and Inclusion

According to a new report, “Reframing the Question of Equity,” community colleges wishing to shrink achievement gaps between white and minority students should focus attention on the nearly two-thirds of their students who attend part time. The report states that despite huge investments in success strategies, the gap in degree attainment between white and Hispanic students has remained unchanged and the disparities between white and black students have grown slightly. And low-income, first-generation students are nearly four times more likely than their peers to drop out after their first year.  Part of the problem, according to the study, is that minority and first-generation students are more likely to attend college part time, but student-success efforts usually focus on full-time students.

Last week, the University of Virginia banned Jason Kessler, the organizer of last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, from its campus and facilities following what the university described as multiple reports from students that Kessler threatened them. The move followed two disturbances in the past eight days involving Kessler at the school’s law library. In a statement, university officials said, “The warning was issued due to multiple reports from students that Mr. Kessler threatened them, targeted them through cyber-bullying and cyber-harassment, and targeted them based on protected characteristics.” Their statement also referenced the events of August, saying that “Kessler also intentionally and purposefully misled officers of the University Police Department regarding the torchlight rally that he helped organize on Aug. 11.”

There are now well over 1,000 colleges and universities that don’t require SAT or ACT scores in deciding whom to admit. And a new study, Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works, finds that scores on those tests are of little value in predicting students’ performance in college. Furthermore, the study found that colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll – and graduate – a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds.

A new report from the think tank Third Way shows that, while most colleges are failing when it comes to graduating low-income students, the University of California system is an exception. The report, which examined the rates that colleges and universities are graduating Pell Grant recipients, (need-based federal grants for low-income students whose families make less than $40,000 a year), found that fewer than half of first-time, full-time Pell students graduate at the institution they started at within six years. By contrast, those who do not receive a Pell Grant are doing much better, and nationally are 18 percent more likely to graduate within that time period. However, schools in the University of California system are doing significantly better than other four-year institutions when it comes to enrolling and graduating low-income students.

More than 300 Harvard affiliates and 22 student groups have signed an open letter to the University demanding reform to certain Harvard structures and policies that they believe led to the forcible arrest of a black undergraduate last month. The arrest sparked allegations of police brutality and protest across campus. The authors of the letter, a group of College students who call themselves Black Students Organizing for Change, first joined together days after the arrest in an effort “to hold Harvard University accountable for the safety of community members, particularly Black and Brown students,” according to the text of the letter, first released last week. The BSOC letter states that the student’s physical confrontation with police comprises evidence that Harvard administrative units-including Harvard University Health Services and Harvard University Police Department-are “not adequately equipped” to serve students.

Sexual Assault and Title IX

A former George Washington University student is suing the school claiming that her sexual assault case was mishandled. The lawsuit alleges that GWU “actively created and was deliberately indifferent to a culture of sexual hostility and violence”. It was filed by Aniqa Raihan, who alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2014, during her freshman year, in a campus dorm room.  The male student Raihan accused in the incident was given a “deferred suspension” instead of facing the disciplinary action that a university panel had recommended, the lawsuit alleges. “The practical effect of that was no sanction, because [Raihan’s alleged assailant] was allowed to continue his studies and graduate on time, as if nothing had happened,” Raihan’s attorney, Alex Zalkin, said at a news conference. The university, he said, “fostered an environment on campus in which sexual misconduct is tolerated and tacitly approved.”

Sexual Health

According to a new report from the University of Texas at Austin, financial barriers and limited access to providers are keeping women at the state’s community colleges from getting the effective contraceptives they prefer. The study, from UT Autsin’s Population Research Center found that Texas community college women are using condoms and withdrawal methods, even though they would prefer to use more effective methods like intrauterine devices, or IUDs, and birth control pills. “What that tells us is that we could do a better job – we as in colleges, clinics – could be doing a better job in helping women to get the more effective methods they want to be using,” said Kristine Hopkins, the lead author of the report, which surveyed more than 1,000 Texas community college women in fall 2014 and spring 2015.