How colleges can support students mental health (opinion) insidehighered.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from insidehighered.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
From finding ways to offer counseling sessions virtually to creating mental health and wellness content for broader student outreach, campus counseling centers have pivoted operations and sought innovative ways to help stressed students as the pandemic shut the country down and then lingered (and lingered some more). While higher ed institutions may have felt that they’ve gone all in on prioritizing mental health, the latest Student Voice survey on mental health services and supports points to problems with both image and execution.
Conducted by
Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse and presented by Kaplan, the survey captured the perceptions of 2,002 college students (mainly traditional aged, and all but 250 from four-year institutions) one year into life with COVID-19.
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Loss of connection is about much more than missing parties or study groups: it impacts mental and emotional health, the ability to learn, job prospects, and identity formation. All these needs have been exacerbated this year through a pandemic, a free-falling economy and events that have put racial and social justice at the forefront.
Virtual experiences don’t provide the same comfort: discussions surrounding social injustice and the urgency for change have been ineffective in the virtual environment as the lines between sincerity and lip service are blurred. As students grapple within themselves and discover their core values, they are looking for peers and mentors who share their sentiments and can help them cope, but this year has provided few routes to establishing these key relationships and identities.
Other research has explored sources of stress. For example, in interviews conducted for the Applied Cognitive Ergonomics Laboratory at Texas A&M University, “academic was the top anxiety,” says postdoctoral researcher Xiaomei Wang.
One Student Voice survey respondent says the focus on mental health is all talk. “No one actively reaches out and makes sure students are doing OK, and no one takes action to address the root causes of the issues. No matter how anxious or depressed you are, that paper’s still due on Friday.”
Respondents, 46 percent of whom are currently taking all online courses from home, report greater mental health needs if they fall into certain at-risk groups. Forty-three percent of those identifying as nonbinary in gender, for example, say their mental health has decreased a lot since COVID (versus 32 percent of all respondents). The good news? These students were three times more likely than the full sample to have recently used college counseling.