Although the word “matters” has become nearly ubiquitous as a #tag in today’s popular discourse, a Matter of great importance took place in mid-March, when the Mental Health Matters Conference: Creating a Culture of Care in Higher Education convened in the Davis Center’s Grand Maple Ballroom. Attended by over 200 education and mental health professionals from the New England states, New York and Canada, the daylong conference organized by UVM and The College of Education and Social Services (CESS) brought a necessary spotlight to bear on a subject of mounting concern in higher education.
In her welcoming remarks CESS Dean Fayneese Miller summed up why the conference mattered. “Never before have we had the groundswell of students who are coming to us with mental health issues. We always thought it was a K-12 problem and that when students came to us we could focus on academics and social engagement, what we normally do to make them productive members of our community and prepared for life after graduation. But we no longer have that luxury. Given the pressing need for increased health services we must now pay attention to the emotional and mental wellbeing of our students as well as to how we attend to those needs.”
To that end, the conference’s mission was not merely to recapitulate the many student mental health issues facing those on campus today but to focus on how to create a campus educational environment that is responsive to and supportive of those in need.
Greg Eells, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Cornell University, in his Keynote address, “Creating a Caring Campus Community: A Review of a Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health,” offered a model of what a healthy campus educational environment would look like. Dr. Eells in his talk presented a broad based approach to mental health promotion on campus, offering a mental health framework designed to strengthen wellbeing and create a campus climate built upon respect and inclusion.
Dr. Eells began with a story, a story about how his home institution went about changing the broader campus culture surrounding public health. The effort recognized that the greater numbers of ‘at risk’ students who need interventions fall outside the smaller group who actually seek help from campus mental health professionals, and that ‘prevention,’ therefore, was more than looking at and dealing with individual cases. “We needed to move from a high risk approach to a population based approach,” he said, “We had to think more broadly than just individuals and to create a campus environment that involved all of us.” He continued, “We realized that cultural norms needed to be changed, so that every one who fell within the ‘curve of risk,’ even at the lowest levels, was in a better place. Thus, we set in motion our plan to provide broader interventions that targeted the entire group of students who fell within the curve.”
Key to this effort, Dr. Eells said, is the idea of “shared responsibility.” He acknowledged that putting this idea into practice in order to create a caring community was easier said than done. “Fostering a healthy educational environment starts at the top,” he said, “with the President and Provost conveying the message that this is important.” He suggested that they and other university leaders share their own stories as a way to get students to think about their own experiences. We know, he said, from the research on stigma, “that it’s not so much how others think about you but how you think about yourself that determines mental health outcomes. Sharing stories, he said, sending out a message to the boarder campus community that we’re all in this together, contributed to shifting the campus climate about mental health issues in a positive direction.
For the remainder of his talk, Dr.Eells spoke about how to promote this positive side of the campus mental health equation. How, he asked, do you make everyone healthier? How do you promote social connection, life skills, and resilience? How do you get people to think about the ways that they are connected to the community?
The answer, Dr. Eells suggested, is to reduce risk by focusing on ways we can build peoples skills, not only the traditional ones like study, time, and stress management, but others such as student leadership development and resilience programing. Drawing support from recent positive psychology research into resilience, Dr. Eells argued that when students are able to think about their place in an institution they will be more resilient, and better able to bounce back.” The thing about resilience, he said, is that it can be taught, and teaching students positive ways to respond to the crises they experience will result in more positive mental health outcomes.
Dr Eells offered the acronym S.A.V.E.S as a handy shorthand to the components of resilience that can be taught:
· Social Connection, he suggested, is one of the most important components of resilience and a bulwark against the deleterious effects of the corrosive belief that “I don’t belong.”
· Attitude, to change to allow for positive events to outweigh negative events.
· Values, is about balancing contrasts and experiences in order to pursue what matters.
· Emotional Acceptance, also a key component, and one that many students struggle with. Here the key is to teach the importance of acceptance of emotional experiences rather than avoidance.
· Silliness. Resilience research shows the importance of incorporating humor into ones experience, and by not taking yourself to serious, turning it into strength. “Laughter is the anesthesia for living,” Dr. Eells said, for it “helps us integrate opposing perspectives and make meaning of suffering. Plus research shows,” he said, “that laughter helps relieve pain, increase happiness ratings and strengthen the immune response.”
The goal of these campus mental health efforts, Dr. Eells concluded, is to foster resilience, lower stigma, and increase help-seeking behavior, the last of which Dr. Eells spoke more fully about during his break out session later in the conference.
Other break out sessions included approaches to suicide prevention, psychiatric disabilities, LGBTQ identities, cultural and linguistic competence, alcohol, marijuana and other drug use (AOD), autism spectrum, innovative outreach, facilitated meditation, trauma and substance abuse, managing distressed and disruptive students in the classroom, and recovery communities.
Of special note was the break out session presented by CESS’s George Leibowitz, Department of Social Work, and Maria Torres, Brandeis University, titled “Improving Quality of Care for Individuals Seeking Behavioral Health Treatment: The role and impact of health care reform, trauma-informed care, and recognized service delivery gaps on research and practice.”
By all reports, a productive day for all participants, who came away from the conference with an abundance of new knowledge and tools for prevention, recognition, intervention, crisis management and referral, to take back to their home institutions and put into practice.
And lastly, Dean Miller gave a special shout out in her opening remarks to Doug Gilman, CESS’s Special Events Coordinator, for the hard work and long hours he put into organizing this successfully event. All kudos to Doug for a job well done.