UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Andrew Guest

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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.

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Core Matters: PSY 101 – Come on and tell me, who are you?

[Note: this post is the first in what is intended to be an ongoing series describing various core classes that are part of the UP core curriculum. Each began with the general prompt: How does your core course, or how do your department’s core courses, serve UP’s liberal arts core curriculum, and a broader vision of a liberal education?]

In the early weeks of PSY 101, while framing what it means to see through a psychological lens, we spend a good few days working through a classic question in psychology: why are you who you are? Your parents? Yes, but because of their parenting or their genes? And are you really just like your parents? Or is much of what defines you, your taste in music, your politics, your style, your speech, more like your peer group than your parents? And how much, anyway, is from all those many hours you spent in schools? How about all those hours on the playing fields or in drama productions? And what about your DNA, of which you share about 85% with mice, about 98.8% with chimps, and 99.9% with most any other human? Does that help explain why your parents (and your professors) tend to like The Who, while you spent your teenage years on Taylor Swift and Drake.

These, of course, are all versions of the broader nature-nurture question, which most students confront in a variety of classes and thus know well enough to answer ‘both.’ But in our PSY 101 class, tasked with the core element of ‘diversity and difference’, we take the nature-nurture question as an opportunity to think about diversity through a social science lens. What about us, and our psychology, is a product of our social, cultural, and interpersonal experiences? What exactly creates the wonders of human diversity? And, just as importantly, what about us is a product of human nature? Understanding diversity, it turns out, benefits greatly from also being able to understand what does not vary – what aspects of the mind that are relatively universal and predisposed.

Though at UP we give PSY 101 instructors a fair amount of autonomy to tailor the course to their own teaching style, most of us follow a trajectory that is common across American undergraduate psychology. After a small bit of history, theory, and methods to frame the course, most PSY 101 courses start with the more biological side of psychology: how does the brain work, how does it sense and perceive information, and how do conditioning and reinforcement shape behavior? This usually then transitions into more cognitive topics including memory, intelligence, and information processing, while also introducing developmental concepts about change over time and social psychological perspectives on the importance of groups and context. It is only in the final stretch of a PSY 101 course, after establishing a foundation of psychology as a science, that we talk about mental health. This often starts with biopsychosocial perspectives on physical health, and progresses into introductions to psychological disorders and their treatment.

All these topic are leavened with the nature-nurture question and our core questions: “How do relationships and communities function? What is the value of difference?” We specifically ask students to “interpret ways that psychological and social factors vary or are similar across diverse groups of people” and to be able to “explain and analyze the ways that key concepts from psychology such as socialization, identity, and heritably contribute to differences among individuals and groups.”

Because much research in psychology is specifically devoted to understanding diversity, our PSY 101 course has much to draw upon. In my classes, for example, I frame much of the brief introduction to social psychology around research on prejudice and discrimination. This starts with the idea that the human mind is efficiently designed to take short cuts – and to group things together in ways that have social meaning. Drawing on social identity theory, we talk about how easy it is to create enmity between groups that might otherwise have much in common through the use of identity markers, competition, and socially defined groupings (think, for example, of rival sports fans who love the same sport but seem to hate each other). And we open up questions of why contemporary society puts an emphasis on certain identity groups over others, and what might be done if we were thinking about equity from a psychological perspective.

This is a decidedly scientific approach to understanding diversity, and contrasts with a more humanistic approach focused on affective values. In fact, when a group of UP psychology faculty used a core assessment process to do research about understandings of diversity we set out to explicitly test whether scientific understandings associated with humanistic sentiment in our PSY 101 students. For the most part they did not – but that was at least partially because most UP students already rate themselves quite highly on their more humanistic respect for diversity.

The scientific lens on human phenomena is, however, what we psychologists know best – and we think it is a critical piece of a quality liberal arts education. There is a saying that if you care about people, you should care about the social sciences, and we think the particular lens the social sciences offer towards understanding people using empirical methods is essential for any college student. We hope that students leave PSY 101 with a foundation for thinking empirically about any of the issues they confront in their lives – from their prospective career path, to their political values, to their human interactions. We also use PSY 101 to offer a foundation for making that thinking practical: we introduce research skills, interpersonal skills, helping skills, and analytical skills that can be useful in any vocation. And, finally, we hope that reflecting on the implicit questions underlying our course – who are you, and why – contribute to the broader journey of a UP education towards people who successfully integrate head, hands, and heart.

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Core Matters: A (Re) Introduction to the UP Core Curriculum

Starting in the 2017-2018 academic year, as UP began a process to revitalize its liberal arts core curriculum, one of the most frequent comments I’ve heard is that the core has simply become a “checklist.” People still like the idea of the core, and people still believe in the value of the liberal arts. But some of the details about what that all means seem to have gone missing. Somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a diminishing of shared understandings around why the core curriculum characterizes a University of Portland education and why being a comprehensive university with a liberal arts core matters.

As I’ve looked back at the original vision for the core, I’ve come to think this is less a problem of the curriculum itself and more a problem of things taken for granted. The longer we’ve used the core, the more we take it as simple matter-of-fact and starve it of the vibrant discourse so central to a good liberal arts education.

This ‘core matters’ blog project is one small effort to re-engage that discourse, and to provide a resource to anyone interested in the UP core curriculum including those directly involved in the core revitalization. The goal is to use posts on the Teaching & Learning Community Blog to progressively build a compendium of brief essays about what happens (and what could happen) in UP core courses. I have started asking the chairs of departments teaching in the core the following question:

How does your core course, or how do your department’s core courses, serve UP’s liberal arts core curriculum, and a broader vision of a liberal education?

(Note that ‘liberal’ here deriving from the Latin liberalis and is associated with freedom and the functioning of free citizens – aligning also with the University of Portland motto Veritas vos Liberabit, or the ‘truth will set you free’).

The hope is that the chairs will help recruit faculty teaching in their departments’ core courses to write ~1000 word answers to this question for the benefit primarily of current and future UP faculty. The idea is that while most of us know the basic core requirements, and know the general intention of the core, we are often less clear on what happens in specific classes. As proof of concept, I’ve drafted and posted an essay for the core course I know best – the PSY 101: General Psychology course that has fulfilled a social science core requirement for at least the 15 years I’ve been teaching at UP.

Lars Larson, current chair of English and active participant in shaping how we do writing in the core, has agreed to help me shepherd more such essays – and will be posting his own ~1000 words on the English core course next week. We are encouraging other faculty to interpret the above question broadly and be creative in relating it to various disciplines. But we also hope to include some consideration of how a course (or courses) addresses UP’s specific core questions and core goals. The plan is to post these brief essays as they become available through this 2018-2019 academic year so that by the end of the year we have a relatively complete online compendium.

It is also the case that part of the intention is to articulate the broader value of the liberal arts, while also remembering that UP’s liberal arts core is only one part of a broader UP education. The 39 credits of the core constitute less than a third of the overall credit load required to graduate, and an even smaller portion of the holistic UP educational experience given the importance of residentiality, service, faith life, extracurricular activities, and other modes of formation central to a Holy Cross education. So while the liberal arts core, let alone any individual course, does not by itself need to accomplish the entire UP mission, it does provide an essential foundation for what is characteristic of a UP education.

In that vein, it may also be helpful to remember that the liberal arts have historically been distinguished (from other disciplinary endeavors such as the ‘mechanical arts’ or the ‘practical arts’) by an emphasis on the intrinsic value of knowledge and developing broad intellectual capacities such as reason, judgment, aesthetics, and analytical thinking. In his book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? Mark William Roche, former dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, argues that there are three broad ways the liberal arts matter: 1) for its intrinsic value and opportunities for “asking the great questions that give meaning to life”; 2) for cultivating intellectual virtues that are critical to success in any career path or civic engagement; and 3) for contributing to character formation and “the connection to a higher purpose.”

So how might the courses that have perhaps too often become just tick marks on a checklist actually help towards those much grander ideals? We hope to find out in this (cyber) space.