Mental and Behavioral Health
A daylong conference at Ohio State University on suicide prevention offered an opportunity for schools across the state to learn more about one of the leading causes of student deaths. Senior Vice President for Student Life Javaune Adams-Gaston and Interim Chair of the Wexner Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health Eileen Ryan, who are co-chairs of the school’s Suicide and Mental Health Task Force, presented the findings and conclusions of the group’s newly released report and recommendations and discussed the university’s response to campus suicide. The report recommended building a “culture of care” on campus that finds ways to minimize psychological harm to students and encourages students, faculty and staff to look out for one another. Nicole Collier, an OSU student who had previously struggled to navigate the university mental health services, spoke at the conference and shared her story of surviving suicidal thoughts and achieving wellness.
Student government leaders at Indiana State University are developing a proposal to help address the growing need for mental health services on campus. The goal of the proposal is to hire more staff for both the student counseling center and student health promotion office. In addition to additional mental health services, the proposal will address more preventive programming as well as mental health first aid training for students, residence hall staff, faculty and staff who interact directly with students.
A new organization at Central Michigan University is working to break the stigma on mental health issues. The Mental Health Alliance was created several months ago by student Katrina Gallego, who says she wants to start a conversation about mental health on campus. “We are a group of people who just aim to bring people together and we want to educate ourselves on mental health so then we can move along and educate others,” says Gallego. The group emphasizes that “it’s OK to not be OK” and is holding events all year to end the stigma around mental health.
In an op-ed in the Daily Bruin, the Editorial Board argues that University of California LA’s Counseling and Psychological Services should accept its limitations and embrace an identity as a short-term treatment center, focusing on triage and referrals out to community providers. According to the editorial, the university’s CAPS has a reputation for long appointment wait times, cramped space, and limited funding and personnel. Nicole Green, CAPS executive director, has said that the service’s lack of space for confidential appointments and personnel shortages have forced it to prioritize certain patients, and has framed CAPS as a short-term campus resource that should direct students to external, long-term psychological care services if they need it. However, according to the editorial board, the operations of the service do not match that stated goal. The op-ed claims that the recently created student advisory board and partnerships with student-run, mental well-being organizations give the impression that the service is equipped to address serious mental health cases – many of which can require long-term care.
UC Davis has released the recommendations of three task forces that addressed basic student needs including affordable student housing, food security and mental health care. The mental health task force recommendations include: Improving access to mental health services; forming a suicide prevention and “postvention” protocol; creating pathways for getting feedback from students, including a student advisory board and regular outreach to students; creating a culture of student mental health beyond the clinical setting that includes all members of the campus community who regularly interact with and support students; and empowering and including student groups and community organizers in mental health-related conversations and discussions.
In a bid to provide more support and respond to concerns about student wellness, the University of Pennsylvania, beginning with the freshman class entering in 2020, will require students to live on campus through sophomore year. (Students are currently allowed to move off after freshman year.) Penn’s change was recommended by two university task forces on student wellness, which outlined problems students faced when they moved off campus and barriers the college had in providing support to students once they were gone. It also follows concerns in recent years about student suicides at Penn and questions whether the university does enough to help troubled students. More than a dozen Penn students have died by suicide since 2013.
A seven-month review of the health and safety policies and procedures followed by the University of Wisconsin athletic department resulted in several recommendations from student-athletes and staff. According to the review, which was released Friday, “Student-athletes desire improved mental health services, which reflects a similar need across the student body as a whole.”
Diversity and Inclusion
Last week, the Common Application, a nonprofit organization that runs an online admissions platform used by more than 800 institutions, announced that it planned to acquire Reach Higher, the college-access initiative started by Michelle Obama, the former first lady. Officials at the Common Application hope that the merger will enable the organization to have a “wider sphere of influence” among prospective college applicants. Reach Higher has confronted social and systemic barriers to higher education, and sought ways to translate research and public policy into on-the-ground action. The Common Application plans to draw on the group’s insights to develop best practices on overcoming college-access barriers.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights will investigate whether Yale University‘s undergraduate admissions policies discriminate against undergraduate applicants based on race, according to a statement from Peter Salovey, Yale’s president. The Yale investigation is based on a 2016 complaint filed by a group called the Asian American Coalition for Education, which stated that Yale, Brown University, and Dartmouth College treated Asian-American applicants differently during the admissions process, and that the colleges were illegally discriminating against those applicants. Last year, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants. A nonprofit group, Students for Fair Admissions, had sued Harvard, alleging bias against Asian and Asian-American applicants. The Justice Department has stated that Harvard’s admissions policy could be “infected with racial bias.”
In the Chronicle, Dwight Lang, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, reflected on teaching a class called “The Experience of Social Class in College and the Community.” For the class, students wrote essays exploring social and economic class experiences from their family lives, K-12 education, communities, and undergraduate years. Lang argues that as leaders of selective colleges embark on the long-overdue task of enrolling more students from diverse classes, they must understand that class distinctions persist, and that to ignore them is to overlook the causes and results of being poor and working class in America.
At the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s national conference, a panel session, titled “Racism in College Counseling and Recruitment: Practices That Reinforce White Privilege and Systemic Racial Prejudice” focused on the systems that campuses have in place that benefit white students over nonwhite students. Panelists discussed everything from who recruits students to a particular college, which colleges counselors tell high school students are unsafe, and the support mechanisms that are in place for students of color once they arrive on a campus.
The Chronicle for Higher Education created an interactive table depicting diversity on campus based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. The table shows the race, ethnicity, and gender of students at 4,342 colleges and universities.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
In an op-ed in The Daily Reveille, Louisiana State University student Jasmine Edmonson argues that the LSU Police Department and Student Health Center’s Rape Aggression Defense class should be a required course for graduation. R.A.D., a 12- hour self-defense course, provides techniques women can use to protect themselves against sexual violence. The class teaches awareness of surroundings in order to minimize the risk of attack, and physical defense, during which women learn verbal and nonverbal cues to show their assailant they are capable of fighting back.
Catholic University‘s president suspended a dean whose comments on social media last week questioned allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Will Rainford, the dean of the National Catholic School of Social Service, posted on his @NCSSSDean Twitter account, “Swetnick is 55 y/o,” referring to Julie Swetnick, the third woman to accuse Kavanaugh of misconduct in recent weeks. “Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!” Catholic University students protested Monday. More than 100 students, alumni and others gathered on campus to “demand dignity for survivors of sexual assault, and to reject victim-blaming in all its forms,” according to their shared announcement of the campus protest which demanded the resignation of Rainford. “He has lost the confidence of the vast majority of students,” said Anthony Hain, a student in the master’s program at the school, “as well as a growing and large number of alumni.” Rainford issued a written apology Thursday evening.
Sexual Health
The University of California and California State University schools will not be required to offer medication abortions on campus after Governor Jerry Brown vetoed Senate Bill 320 just before the deadline. Brown wrote: “This bill requires every student health center at University of California and California State University campuses to offer medication abortions beginning January 1, 2022. Access to reproductive health services, including abortion, is a long-protected right in California. According to a study sponsored by supporters of this legislation, the average distance to abortion providers in campus communities varies from five to seven miles, not an unreasonable distance. Because the services required by this bill are widely available off-campus, this bill is not necessary.”
Substance Use
Ithaca College resident assistants and other students are now being trained to administer Narcan – a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose – in a pre-emptive effort to combat drug abuse at the college. Illegal opiate use on campus rose 2.8 percent to 3 percent from 2015 to 2017, according to the National College Health Assessment. While this is a small increase, the national average for opioid use is also rising slowly, from 4.5 percent to 5 percent between 2015 and 2017.
