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Intersections? How diversity, mental health, and teaching might mix

an aerial view of 2 intersecting footpathsThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

Anyone paying attention to higher education in recent years is well aware of two pressing issues on regular repeat: changing perceptions of student mental health needs, and the need to better attend to diversity and inclusion. But how might those two issues intersect? How might an equity lens inform the way academics, and academic institutions, think about student mental health?

Several organizations working collaboratively on those issues (including the JED Foundation and the Steve Fund) recently produced an “Equity in Mental Health Framework” that highlights needs and offers ten specific “recommendations for colleges and universities to support the emotional well-being and mental health of students of color.” The full report is available on-line, and while it is a bit more oriented towards administrative policy than classroom practice it is worth a browse for the curious. For this teaching and learning blog, however, here are a few quick takeaways that might inform faculty and academic staff at UP.

First, the report notes that there are good empirical reasons (beyond the obvious ethical reasons) to pay attention to equity in mental health. In two national studies involving thousands of racially diverse college students Harris Poll research found, among other things, that:

  • “First-year college students of color are significantly less likely than white students to rate their overall college experience as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ (69% to 80%)”
  • “Students of color are significantly less likely than white students to rate their campus climate as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ (61% to 79%)”
  • “Students of color are significantly less likely to describe their campus as inclusive (28% to 45%)”

These types of statistics do not by themselves suggest that students of color are necessarily more or less likely to confront mental health issues – in fact, mental health concerns are a relatively equal opportunity reality (with some interesting and important demographic differences). But they do suggest that college and university environments may have a different social and emotional climate for students from diverse backgrounds.

So what can be done to promote a social and emotional climate that is supportive and inclusive for all students? Many of the recommendations in the ‘Equity in Mental Health Framework’ are structural (including, for example, promoting “the mental health and well-being of students of color as a campus-wide priority” and to “actively recruit, train and retain a diverse and culturally competent faculty and professional staff”). There are also several that might be worth thinking about for our work with students in and around the classroom.

Recommendation #4, for example, involves creating “opportunities to engage around national and international issues/events” including cultural movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. This seems like a natural fit for many educational contexts – both in and out of classrooms. It is not always easy to create constructive spaces that are genuinely educational to discuss current events that are complex and evolving, but it is worth remembering that doing so thoughtfully can matter to students who otherwise feel disconnected and marginalized.

Recommendation #7, as a second example, involves offering “a range of supportive programs and services in varied formats” that might include discussion groups and workshops allowing students from diverse backgrounds to connect and engage with developing identity issues. This recommendation makes me think of the many positive experiences I know UP students have had with groups such as the Hawai’i Club, the Black Student Union, the Feminist Discussion Group, Active Minds, and many others that are student-driven but thrive with faculty and staff support.

Working toward “equity in mental health” at colleges and universities is a big project that goes well beyond just what academics do with teaching and learning. But we faculty and academic staff can do our part by recognizing the ways teaching and learning can create further intersections for both equity and mental health.

 

Featured Image: Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash

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Who; What; Where; When; Why: A Quick Primer-Reminder on Mental Health Services for Students at UP

Orrico hall, home of U P health and counseling servicesEven for faculty and academic staff paying careful attention to student mental health, it can be helpful to remind ourselves how things work at UP. So here is a quick primer (or, more hopefully, a reminder) about what is available through UP’s counseling services to students who seem to be struggling in our classes for reasons other than academic skills.

WHO: The UP Health and Counseling Center offers both primary care and counseling services to students, with the counseling side of things comprising four full-time professional psychologists and two practicum students (usually third year doctoral students who spend 2.5 days a week on campus seeing students and organizing groups for one academic year). The director of UP’s Health and Counseling Center, Carol Dell’Oliver, is also a clinical psychologist who occasionally sees students amidst her busy administrative schedule.

Starting in the 2017-2018 academic year, the Health and Counseling Center has also contracted with ProtoCall to make after-hours phone counseling available – students can reach licensed clinicians any time of day for ‘specialty telephonic behavioral health services’ by calling the main UP Health and Counseling phone number (503 943 7134) and taking option ‘3’ after hours.

It is also worth remembering that UP’s Early Alert system has been expanded in recent years to offer a useful first point of contact and referral when faculty are concerned about student mental health.

WHAT: As was described in another TLC blog post, “the Health and Counseling Center reserves two appointment slots every work day for emergency needs – ensuring that students experiencing acute mental health concerns can get same day help. They also have nine daily appointments for 20 minute initial consultations with one of the counseling staff, ensuring that most any student with non-emergency concerns can talk to a professional within a few days.”

After initial consultations, UP’s counseling services focuses on short-term therapeutic work – ranging from a few 50 minute sessions to a few months’ worth of sessions. If students need more intensive longer-term therapy they are referred outside the University. As with college counseling services nationally, the most common issues students want to discuss in counseling are anxiety and depression – but it is also common to have students discuss relationships, adjustment to college, identity issues, and more. In prior years about 16% of UP students have utilized counseling services – which is slightly, but not dramatically, higher than the national average.

The primary care side of the Health and Counseling Center can also help students with medication prescriptions when needs are mild to moderate, though when students have more serious medication needs those are often managed by outside providers.

WHERE: The Health and Counseling Center is on the top floor of Orrico Hall – above the Career Center, snuggled in-between the physical plant building and Mehling Hall. Information is also available at: https://www.up.edu/healthcenter/index.html

WHEN: The Health and Counseling Center is open Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. They close daily from 12:00 p.m.- 1:00 p.m.. As noted above, they also make after hours phone counseling available by calling the main line at 503 943 7134 and selecting option 3.

WHY: There are lots of reasons for faculty to pay attention to student mental health – starting with the fact that any person in distress needs others to show they care. It is also both intuitively and empirically evident that students struggling with mental health concerns also often (though not always) struggle with their academic work.

But it is also important for faculty and academic staff to remember that our job is not to become para-professional counselors in addition to professors – our job is to pay attention to, and care about, our students by helping them find the help they may sometimes need. So, as we approach new semesters or points of academic rut, I hope it is helpful to remember the ways UP makes such help available for students (including many parts of the University outside of the Health and Counseling Center).

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Kids These Days: The Media (and Social Media) on Student Mental Health

young man looking at smartphone

In recent weeks several major feature articles have perpetuated a growing trend to portray today’s students – particularly those in high school and college – as unusually fragile and disposed to mental health problems. First, in a September article in The Atlantic provocatively titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” psychologist Jean Twenge suggested we are on “the brink of a mental health crisis” among adolescents.  Then, in the October 11th issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine journalist Benoit Benizet-Lewis wrote from the titular question “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering from Severe Anxiety?”

These articles clearly touched a nerve – as I write the latter article has been atop the New York Times most popular list for nearly a full week. And both are worth reading. As long as you don’t get caught up in the moral panic that seems to be pervading discussions of student mental health.

In the Twenge Atlantic article, she presents some interesting data suggesting that technology may be enabling teens to do less real socializing and more virtual socializing – she notes, for example, that “only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.” She also has interesting data about the need to be constantly connected leading to serious sleep problems, and makes a reasonable case that excessive technology usage associates with unhappiness. She does not, however, provide as much tangible data for her claim that “iGen” is “on the brink of the worst-mental health crisis in decades.”

Likewise, the Benizet-Lewis New York Times article presents compelling case studies of intensely anxious students and cites surveys such as those by the Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A. (surveys that UP students participate in) showing that in 1985 about 18% of college freshmen “felt overwhelmed by all I had to do” compared with 41% in 2016. The Times article also fingers social media as a major culprit, while also nodding to broader parenting and cultural pressures. Importantly, Benizet-Lewis also discusses ways in which excessive accommodations to student anxiety – and a concomitant lack of developing resilience – may exacerbate the problem. And ways that confronting anxieties, recognizing the inevitability of imperfection, can help alleviate anxiety’s grip.

Clearly something is going on around student mental health – there is an intense, and sometimes frightening, awareness of the needs of the kids these days. But that awareness, and its rapid dissemination through the very social media technologies that many finger as root problems, may also be a more optimistic part of what is going on. The recognition of student mental health needs means less stigma, and that by itself may be a more hopeful reason we seem to hear so much more about mental health crises. The hopeful side of this story would be that students who used to suffer in silence, or not attend college at all, are reaching out, getting help, talking about what they need, and persevering.

A version of this more hopeful side of the story was available here at UP during our faculty development day keynote address on mental health in 2016. My clinical psychology colleague Andrew Downs presented data suggesting that while we may be more aware of mental health concerns now than we were in past decades, the actual base rates of psychological distress have probably not changed all that much. Some students have always suffered; a significant part of what has changed is how we recognize and address that suffering.

The former director of UP counseling services Will Meek then followed up with descriptions of what UP offers – quick consultations and assessments (including through early alert) that increasingly help students identify their needs – along with encouragement to faculty to help students by directing them to appropriate resources and by maintaining expectations and boundaries. Part of being a college student is learning to meet new expectations in an environment where your performance in a class does not define your value as a person.

In the popular media, my favorite counterpoint to the profligate ‘mental health crisis’ literature is a Science of Us piece by Jesse Singal on ‘The Myth of the Ever-More-Fragile College Student.’  Part of what Singal points out is that some of the shift is in higher education more broadly – colleges didn’t used to provide full-service mental health facilities because that was the role of community mental health services (which have been significantly de-funded in recent decades). Ultimately, Singal provides a useful alternative spin on why the prominence of social media matters to the story of student mental health:

“What separates present-day moral panics about college students from past ones is that we live in a golden age for confirmation bias. We have greater, more intimate access to scenes from campus life than ever before, which makes it easier than ever before to slip into the trap of “I’m sure this thing is happening because I see evidence it’s happening.” But prior to YouTube and Twitter and the morass of think pieces choking the internet anew every morning, there were also campus-politics freak-outs, there were also nervous breakdowns in counseling centers, there were also tragedies involving students and their mental health — and there were also adults proffering cultural theories for why everything was falling apart.”

For faculty and academic staff it may be worth recognizing that the attention we devote to the very real concerns of students with mental health concerns doesn’t necessarily mean we are in the midst of a what the media likes to frame as a crisis. It may instead mean we are ourselves learning new ways to address old, ongoing, and really important problems.

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To Whom do you Refer? The People on UP’s Counseling Staff

Orrico hall, home of U P health and counseling servicesWhen we on the academic side of the University have concerns about the mental health of our students, one of our obvious resources is the staff of the UP Health and Counseling Center. Whether we get there via Early Alert or through a direct contact, it can be helpful for faculty and academic staff to know who might help us figure out how to help our students – and who is talking to the students who avail themselves of UP services.

For this 2017-2018 academic year there are two new psychologists on staff, along with several returning psychologists providing counseling services (and each year there are also graduate practicum counselors in training). The new psychologists this year are both somewhat on the administrative side of things, though with extensive backgrounds providing counseling services.

Carol Dell-Oliver, Ph.D., is the new Director of the Health and Counseling Center, taking over from Margaret Trout. Carol sent the following introduction for faculty:

Carol Dell-Oliver, Ph.D. is the new Director of the Health and Counseling Center. She has been a licensed clinical psychologist for 24 years, with extensive experience in university settings and private practice. Her areas of specialization include anxiety, depression, disaster recovery, and the assessment and treatment of trauma-related disorders. Her goals for the Health and Counseling Center are to assess UP’s current mental health, substance abuse and suicide efforts and to create a strategic plan to implement improvements. Other goals include expanding services and outreach efforts in health and wellness promotion, and improving students’ access to services to reach diverse and/or underserved populations.

Eliot Altschul, Ph.D., is the new Assistant Director for Counseling and Training, taking over from Will Meek. Eliot sent the following introduction for faculty:

I obtained my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley/SF Bay Area. I trained in the Counseling Centers at Stanford and Boston Universities. Since my training I have held positions at Emory University as the Group Coordinator, George Washington University as a Staff Psychologist and Supervisor, Humboldt State University as their Director of Training, and at Clark College as the Director.  I also have extensive experience in other levels of care including inpatient, residential, day treatment and private practice.

I utilize an integrated approach to my therapeutic work with students including practical and solution-oriented, as well as brief psychodynamic and object relations modalities. I help student/clients understand, experience and manage their own emotional states.  I often approach this from a lens of mindfulness, in terms of self-observation without judgment, and self-compassion.  Some of my areas of interest and expertise include identity development, sexuality and spirituality.

The returning members of the counseling staff include Rikki Cor, Psy.D., Hannah Hoeflich, Psy.D., and Staci Wade-Hernandez, Psy.D.. They wanted to be introduced collectively, and sent the following for faculty:

University of Portland Health and Counseling Center is staffed by four full-time licensed psychologists and two pre-doctoral trainees who hold master’s degrees in psychology. The Counseling Center staff are committed to providing an emotionally safe, accessible, and compassionate space for all University of Portland students. We strive to integrate multicultural humility and competence into our everyday functioning, firmly planted in the belief that all people have dignity and are deserving of respect. Clinicians utilize empathy, open-mindedness, and the therapeutic relationship to increase insight and decrease emotional distress. All consultation and therapy meetings are confidential and student health information cannot be shared without written permission. Mental health counseling is available at no cost to all students enrolled full time at the University of Portland. We provide short-term counseling services for students experiencing a range of concerns. First visits are considered a consultation. These appointments last about 20 minutes and are focused on immediate student concerns and to develop a plan. Due to our model, it is possible that an off-campus referral for services will be made.

/* Featured Image by Andrew Guest

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Student Mental Health: What Faculty (Might?) Need to Know

An empty lecture hall.What do UP faculty, and staff on the academic side of the University, need to know about student mental health? This question has been much on my mind the last few years as discussions about mental health in college has seemed to accelerate both locally and nationally.

At UP the issue particularly came to the fore during the 2015-2016 academic year after a tragic constellation of three student and one staff deaths by suicide. This was followed by a burst of concerted attention: Fr. Poorman created an Ad Hoc Panel on Mental Health to audit, consult, and recommend mental health services and supports for students; the organizing theme for the 2016 Faculty Development Day program was mental health; the University increased staff at the Health and Counseling Center and for related programs such as Early Alert.

There is no doubt that progress has been made. But the start of a new academic year, and the classrooms full of new faces, also offers a reminder that the challenges of educating students in head, hands, and heart are ongoing and dynamic; there is always more to do.

One thing I hope to do this year is to start integrating information about student mental health into the work of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative—and I’d love to hear from others on the academic side of the University about what would be most helpful. With the generous cooperation of Karen Eifler and others, the hope is to regularly make information available on this blog, to host periodic brownbag discussions about specific student mental health issues, and to better communicate among faculty and academic staff about ways of attending to the mental health of our students as a part of good teaching and learning.

As I noted during the 2016 Faculty Development Day program, faculty and academic staff do not need to (and really should not) become paraprofessional counselors – we have an excellent staff of real professional counselors on campus, and many other resources devoted to the mental health of our students. But if we are to truly educate our students as whole people, we do need to be aware of what we can and should do to connect students to services and supports they may sometimes need (as just one example, hopefully most faculty now know that submitting an ‘early alert’ for a student of concern is an important first step in getting access to appropriate help).

One of the important realizations I had while working on the 2015-2016 Ad Hoc Panel on Mental Health was that while there are many great support services for students across the University in departments ranging from athletics, to residence life, to public safety, to campus ministry, the faculty are the only group that will inevitably interact with every single UP student. Our classes are the one thing every UP student must do.

As such, there may also be ways to think about the educational environments we create on the academic side of the University in relation to mental health promotion. What, for example, can we do in the ways we communicate with students to help destigmatize mental health concerns? How can we help students separate their grades in courses from their value as people? What are best practices in higher education for helping faculty to be allies in creating healthy campus climates?

But this is also where I need your help; I’d love to hear from others what questions, and what insights, you have (please feel free to email me directly at guesta@up.edu). What can we on the academic side do to better open lines of communication that build off the good work done in recent years at UP related to student mental health? As a starting point, look for more in this blog space through the coming year.