UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Andrew Guest

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Getting Involved with the UP Academic Network for Mental Health

Close up of a string networkAre you interested in improving your knowledge around student mental health to facilitate working with all the diverse students in your classes and departments?

As part of ongoing efforts to attend to student mental health at UP, and as part of UP’s participation in the JED Foundation’s Campus Mental Health Action Planning, we are developing the UP Academic Network for Mental Health (what is often called a “gatekeeper” program in other higher education contexts) for faculty and academic staff. Our program will provide a network of people, knowledge, and resources for faculty and staff working directly with students in academic contexts to complement existing campus professionals attending to student mental health through the Early Alert / Care Team, Health and Counseling Center, Residential Life, and other offices of Student Affairs. Members of the Network will primarily serve as resource people and liaisons for other faculty and academic staff needing expertise on working with students of concern – any direct intervention or case management will remain the responsibility of campus professionals.

These types of trainings and programs are considered a best practice for colleges and universities, with clear evidence for increasing knowledge and awareness of mental health issues and some evidence for increasing utilization of appropriate mental health service (for discussions of the research see here, here, and here). For such programs to be effective, the evidence suggests they work best with ongoing training and commitments beyond just initial exposure to addressing student mental health concerns.

What would members of UP’s Academic Network for Mental Health do?

We are planning on two levels of responsibilities for members of the Network. At the first level, members would simply be available as resources, collegial support, and connectors for other faculty. These first level networkers would, after attending basis training in working with students with mental health concerns, be available for discussions about students of concern, and would help connect faculty and academic staff to appropriate resources – including the Early Alert / Care Team, and the Health and Counseling Center.

At the second level, some members of the Network would serve the same resource and liaison role while also committing to joining a coordinating team involving some ongoing commitment to helping faculty and academic staff work with student mental health concerns. Members of this coordinating team would develop expertise and academic initiatives related to mental health through ongoing programming and engagement – including at least one gathering per year with psychologists from the Health and Counseling Center, at least one gathering per year with members of the UP Care Team, and at least one meeting with student groups such as Active Minds to keep lines of communication open and to generate prospective new initiatives. Finally, members of the coordinating team would be identified as resources in case of critical incidents (such as a student suicide) to help respond to the needs of those affected.

Who would be a good member for UP’s Academic Network for Mental Health?

Any member of faculty or academic staff who feels motivated to take an active role around campus mental health is welcome. For the second level coordinating team we additionally hope to identify at least 10 faculty / academic staff to form a core group that is representative of UP’s different colleges and constituencies.

Why might someone want to join the Network?

Being part of the network would qualify as service to the university, and would offer the potential for genuine contributions to campus well-being. It will also provide free professional development opportunities that can improve our work in the classroom and our ability to educate students as whole people.

How do I start?

We are planning a faculty training on Friday January 11th (the end of week before Spring 2019 semester classes start), and will start regular meetings in the Spring of 2019. The January 11th training will start at 10:30 with a 90 minute suicide prevention training for any interested faculty working the students, and then a smaller coordinating group will continue after a lunch break with a discussion and planning session from 12:30 to 2:00. This training will be facilitated by Jim Gouveia, a counselor from Oregon State University with expertise in gatekeeper training and student mental health.

We are also planning a full-day ‘Mental Health First Aid’ training for academic program counselors and associate deans for students on Friday February 22nd – which would be optional for faculty.

To join or with questions please contact Andrew Guest (guesta@up.edu) or other members of the sub-group organizing the gatekeeper program (Elise Moentmann, Lisa Reed, Sarina Saturn, Andrew Downs, Carol Dell’Oliver, Gina Loschiavo, Megan Cohara, and Michael Pelley)

 

Featured Image: Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

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Mentally Healthy: Reducing (Student) Stress

person meditating on a beachThere is a study I cite often when teaching my Lifespan Development course about psychological well-being across ages that always resonates with students. Researchers took data from a 2008 telephone survey of over 340,000 people in the United States to investigate how components of well-being, such as stress, anger, worry, and sadness, tend to change with age. Between ages 18 and 85 general psychological well-being tends to follow a U-shaped curve – higher at younger and older ages with a nadir around the late 40’s and early 50’s (yes, I’m looking at you tenured faculty member!).

Emotions like ‘enjoyment’ and ‘happiness’ tend to peak around college age, while ‘worry’ and ‘sadness’ stay pretty flat between college and people’s 50’s – only declining in old age. But the one psychological experience that people self-report to be highest around the college years is one we probably hear the most about from our students: stress.

Stress, from a psychological perspective, is not necessarily a bad thing. Stress, in the right amounts, can be motivating and energizing. But feeling chronically stressed is clearly not a good thing. Ongoing perceptions of stress weigh on us emotionally, and have demonstrably negative effects on our health – both physical and mental. Ongoing stress, when not well managed, can trigger more serious mental health issues.

Importantly for college students, however, psychological stress is by its nature a perception. When a student reacts badly to getting a ‘B’ or to the social slights inherent in college life, it can be tempting from a faculty perspective to be dismissive – to think, ‘wait until you get into the real world.’ And, in fact, a more diplomatic version of reality testing is built into many effective stress management techniques – such as those that help people recognize common cognitive distortions and tendencies to catastrophize. But it is important to remember that is not how it feels for many students, and to recognize that a significant number of students do experience very real stresses from classes, work, finances, friends, family, health, and the necessary identity work that is part of why college matters.

So what can faculty do without sacrificing the academic rigor and boundaries that are important for long-term student success? The Cornell faculty resource guide that has served as a model for this on-line UP handbook has several practical suggestions specific to academic faculty, and then there are some broad principles from psychology of encouraging ‘distress tolerance’ that might be helpful as tips.

On the practical side for faculty, some of the suggestions for attending to student stress from Cornell include:

  • Making efforts to know students as people – paying attention to names and interests to make sure students feel a balance of challenge and support. It can even be worth reminding them when discussing assignments that you are not grading them as people – just their work in your class, which is only one tiny dimension of who they are.
  • Creating classroom contexts that encourage cooperation rather than competition – UP is generally pretty good about not making academics competitive in a problematic way, but small ways of framing assignments and grades can help students see classmates as colleagues rather than competitors.
  • Being clear in expectations and communication – it can be frustrating for faculty to have to lay out all the little details of every writing assignment, or to create comprehensive review guides for exams. But even half-measures to be clear with expectations can help students focus on actually doing quality work rather than getting overwhelmed by details.
  • Evaluating students without causing undue stress – while maintain high standards, make sure to frame test scores in ways that make sense (eg, rather than having a 50 equal a B, adjust the raw score so an 80 equals a B – it works the same in your gradebook, but may be more palatable to students); make sure grades come with clear opportunities to improve and make future corrections; space out key assignments so that they fit the flow of the semester.
  • Leading class meetings in ways that build confidence and respect diversity – recognize the difference between the start of the semester and the end of the semester in terms of what students should know, and work early in the semester to make sure diverse voices are heard with respect.

What about tips for managing stress that go beyond the specific faculty role? The UP Department of Psychological Sciences recently had a brownbag session with some of the psychologists from the UP Health and Counseling Center, and the counselors noted that if they could suggest one thing we might help teach students it would be ‘distress tolerance.’ The basic idea, often associated with dialectical behavioral therapy, is that when we perceive intense stress sometimes the best thing we can do is to simply wait it out in healthy ways. This too shall pass. There are a wide range of techniques for doing this, but some that might be practical to suggest to students in the throes of intense stress have been compiled into the acronym ACCEPTS (borrowed and adapted here using on-line information from the Sunrise Residential Treatment Center):

  • Activities: Rather than just stewing in stress, do something healthy. Just about anything pro-active will do. Read. Cook. Clean. Go for a walk. Talk to a Friend. Exercise. Just don’t stew.
  • Contributing: Get outside yourself by doing something for others. Make someone a meal. Offer to give someone feedback on a paper draft. Give someone a ride. Take yourself out of your own situation.
  • Comparisons: Think about how things could be worse. Social comparisons can be painful, but they can also be helpful when we realize the ways we are lucky in many ways to be fed, safe at home, and getting a good education.
  • Emotions: Dose yourself with the opposite of what you feel. If you are over-wrought, meditate. If you are depressed watch a movie that always makes you laugh.
  • Push away: Distract yourself from your stress. This may not help in the long-term, but in the short term it can help us get our bearings back.
  • Thoughts: Replace your stress with things that keep your mind busy. This might be a game of solitaire, or it might just be going ahead and studying for that test even if you worry you’ll never pass.
  • Sensation: Self-soothe with things that feel good to your body as a way of calming your brain. Eat something comforting. Take a warm bath. Listen to your favorite music. Take a hike in pretty place.

Again, distress tolerance is likely not a great long-term strategy for students – actively building coping skills and gaining insight through therapy are more helpful over time. And sometimes students just need someone to listen, and a space to vent. But other times faculty and academic staff might help remind students of healthy ways to deal with those immediate feelings of stress that our classes, intentionally and unintentionally, occasionally help to create.

Featured Image: Photo by Dardan on Unsplash

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Mentally Healthy: Responding to Students in Distress

man on chair by himself“Brett” started the semester well; bright, engaging, asking great questions, and keeping up with all the readings. Midway through the semester, however, things changed. Brett started missing class, and seemed to be paying less attention to personal hygiene. Brett also seemed to pay less attention to the class in general, and in writing assignments gave hints of angst and uncertainty. But in all these ways Brett was only slightly out of step with the rest of the class – student energy always changes mid-semester, students always get busy, and part of college is about angst. Right?

If you find yourself worried about students like Brett, or if you have students with more obvious signs of psychological distress, it’s worth making an effort – both for the sake of the student, and for the sake of doing what you can to create a healthy learning environment for everyone. So what might you do? One short-hand system for responding is to consult, make contact, and refer.

These three tangible action steps come from a Cornell faculty guide Recognizing and Responding to Students in Distress (which is a model for this UP specific guide):

  • Consult. Check with other faculty to see what they know about the student, and talk to faculty experienced at dealing with mental health situations. Talk to your department chair or Associate Dean. Check with the student’s academic advisor to see if the student has been on track generally. Check with the Shepard Academic Resource Center (503.943.7895) to see if they’ve been working with the student or have advice. Talk with a counselor at the Health and Counseling Center (503.943.7134) about whether what you are observing merits further action. File an Early Alert or call the Early Alert coordinator (503.943.7709) if you want to make sure the student is on the radar for available services.
  • Make contact. If it seems merited after consulting, reach out to the student to see if they are open to talking. Your job here is not to take on anything approximating a counselor role. Instead, making contact is about better understanding what is going on for the student and being able to provide information about resources available to students. Express concern in a positive way; note any observations you’ve made; and make yourself available to listen.
    • If you suspect a student may be considering self-harm or suicide, then ask directly. All suicide prevention programs suggest asking direct questions does not give people ideas; instead it is often a relief and provides critical information. If the student indicates they are thinking about self harm, contact the Health and Counseling Center (503.943.7134)  and/or Public Safety (503.943.4444) with whatever urgency the situation requires.
    • If the student is not actively considering self-harm, then you can….
  • Refer. UP provides a good number of resources for student well-being, and helping students be aware of those resources does not mean you think there is anything particularly wrong – it just means you want students to succeed. For mental health counseling the Health and Counseling Center offers short term services that can lead to referrals for longer-term needs. For academic challenges the first stop is usually the Shepard Academic Resource Center – which offers academic counseling and peer mentoring when needed. Students can also benefit from connections with the residential life staff, campus ministry, the office of International Student Services, opportunities to exercise and recreate, opportunities to volunteer and give back, and other of the many student life options available on a small campus. Social isolation is often both and antecedent and consequence of mental health challenges; encouraging students to engage in ways that fit them can be a valuable service in itself.

Beyond this system of consulting, making contact, and referral, there are several public health efforts toward suicide prevention and psychological well-being. These include a wide variety of programs designed to give anyone basic tools to respond to persons in distress. Two that have had some presence on the UP campus in recent years include the ‘Q.P.R.’ program and ‘Mental Health First Aid.’ Each program involves catchy abbreviations that might be helpful as quick guides for responding to students in distress.

Q.P.R. stands for “Question. Persuade. Refer.” with an emphasis on asking people directly if you fear they are at risk of suicide or self-harm. Then persuading people to accept and seek professional help before acting. And then referring people to appropriate resources – including, beyond the resources above, taking advantage of crisis hotlines such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1.800.273.8255), the Multnomah County Mental Health Crisis Line (503.988.4888), or the Crisis Text Line (Text HOME to 741741).

Mental Health First Aid uses ALGEE as its acronym:

Mental health first aid action plan - assess, listen, give re-assurance, encourage professional help, encourage self-help

Training in these types of methods are occasionally available at UP, and regularly available in Portland through local county mental health programming – conveniently listed for the Portland area at gettrainedtohelp.com.

Featured Image: Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

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Mentally Healthy: Recognizing Students in Distress

This post is the first entry for Part I of the Mentally Health resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

There is, unfortunately, no magic formula for knowing when a student you know is in serious psychological distress. For one thing, all students experience some degree of stress – that is normal, and even helpful for motivation. For another, distress exists on a continuum – from mild to severe. Even professional mental health practitioners have to make informed judgment calls about when distress moves from normal to abnormal; as a member of the faculty or academic staff your job is not to make such judgments. Instead, faculty and academic staff can best serve students by simply being aware of some of the potential markers of distress and the resources that can help students of concern.

In my PSY 101 class, I share with students a simple system from a national public health campaign called The Campaign to Change Direction with “Five Signs” of emotional suffering: personality changes; agitation; withdrawal; poor self-care; and hopelessness. Withdrawal can be particularly tricky for faculty and academic staff – when a student stops showing up for class, we often have no idea what has happened. But it is usually worth erring on the side of caution – check in with the student, and if you don’t hear back consider submitting an early alert. Though UP has lots of good systems in place to make sure students are connected, for some few students classes may be there only real point of contact with the UP community.

(see also a prior Teaching & Learning Community Blog post on the Campaign to Change Direction)

The Cornell University handbook for faculty upon which this on-line resource is modeled has a somewhat more elaborate listing of ‘indicators of distress’ ranging from Academic Indicators to Behavioral and Emotional Indicators to Physical Indicators.

I’d particularly highlight here under ‘Other Factors’ the simple idea of a “hunch or gut-level reaction that something is wrong.” Faculty and academic staff at UP have many students to attend to, and we can’t be solely responsible for them all. But we do tend to pay attention and over the course of the semester get to know students’ dispositions. If your gut tells you something might be wrong and a student might be of concern, go with that hunch – check in with the student, consult with the Health and Counseling Center, or submit an Early Alert.

Finally, the Cornell handbook also emphasizes that in some cases students will make explicit or implicit statements (including, sometimes, in written work) that indicates potential suicidal ideation. In these situations it is particularly important to contact the Health and Counseling Center (503.943.7134) and/or Public Safety (503.943.4444) depending on the immediacy.

Also remember that your job as faculty and academic staff is not to try to be a para-professional counselor; instead your job is to help students take advantage of resources that allow them to be well and to learn in a way that meets their potential. The two key UP resources towards that end are:

  • The Health and Counseling Center (503.943.7134), where staff is always available to consult on questions about students and where after-hours calls are forwarded to a professional counseling service 24 hours a day.
  • Early Alert, which is a system put into place for referrals of students who might need additional attention in a variety of domains.

Finally, remember that if a student is in crisis or at immediate risk of harm your first calls should be to Public Safety (503.943.4444) or 911.

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Mentally Healthy: More Of What Faculty (Might?) Need to Know

It was not so long ago, back in 2015, that UP was shocked by four suicides in less than nine months: three students and one alumnus on the UP staff. Partially in response to those tragic events, through the 2015-16 academic year an Ad Hoc Panel on Mental Health convened to research and recommend ways UP could best address student mental health concerns. Many of those recommendations have been implemented, much good work has been done, and UP has been lucky not to see another spate of high-profile tragedies since 2015. Attending to student mental health, however, is an ongoing concern and there is always more to be done.

The very first recommendation from the 2015-2016 panel was to significantly improve “publicly available information and communications around mental health resources and policies.” As one effort towards that end, I’ve been using this Teaching & Learning Community Blog to share information and ideas for faculty and academic staff concerned about student mental health. While much necessary effort has been made to improve mental health resources on the student affairs side of the University, we on the academic side are the only people who inevitably interact with every University of Portland students. Not all students live in residence halls despite their excellent support networks, not all students visit the Health and Counseling Center despite their excellent resources, but all students by definition have to attend our classes. So what might faculty and academic staff need to know?

First, know that faculty and academic staff are not (and generally should not try to be) paraprofessional counselors. Almost all the best practices in helping students with mental health issues involve simply knowing the available resources and being able to refer students to ways to get professional help. At UP this often starts with the Early Alert system and/or a direct referral to the Health and Counseling Center.

In addition to those immediate resources, last year I wrote a series of 14 blog posts addressing mental health topics that might be of interest to faculty and academic staff. As a first reference point, at the start of the Spring semester I wrote a “quick primer-reminder on mental health services for students at UP” that might be useful for anyone needing practical information about what is available to students. A few other highlights from last year for the curious might include:

This year I’m hoping to update, adapt, and significantly supplement these posts towards the goal of producing (by the end of the 2018-2019 academic year) an on-line handbook for UP faculty and academic staff concerned about student mental health. The model for this is a very useful handbook that Cornell University published in 2009 titled Recognizing and Responding to Students in Distress. The plan is to build off that table of contents to produce material relevant specifically to the University of Portland context that can live and evolve as an on-line document housed here on the Teaching & Learning Community Blog. I am very open to suggestions and/or contributions (contact me at guesta@up.edu), but also plan to work off a preliminary table of contents in three parts:

Part I: Immediate concerns

  1. Ways of recognizing students in distress
  2. Ways of responding to students in distress
  3. Faculty responsibilities – including on the legal side.

Part II: Promoting well-being

  1. Reducing stress
  2. Building resilience
  3. Setting boundaries – balancing challenge and support
  4. Education and training opportunities

Part III: Student concerns

  1. What students want faculty and academic staff to know
  2. The most common mental health issues
  3. The most common trauma experiences
  4. Relationships between diversity, inclusion, and mental health
  5. Issues for special populations including athletes

I am also tentatively hoping for a Part IV that would comprise other campus perspectives from offices such as Health and Counseling Center, Early Alert, Residence Life, Academic Advising, Public Safety, Campus Ministry, Athletics, etc.. So please do let me know any questions or thoughts and stayed tuned into the ways faculty and academic staff can be constructive participants in helping UP be a mentally healthy place to get an education.