There are many wonderful programs across the country in large and small, public and private schools that are striving to meet the mental health crisis on college campuses. A small sampling of a few good ideas include the following:
- The University of Maryland offers for-credit courses to freshmen aimed at helping them deal with stress and time management, and similar other issues. They have found that 86 percent of the students who took the course returned for their sophomore year, compared with 69 percent of a comparable group who did not take the course. Such courses are now offered by about two-thirds of the nation's schools.
- The University of Rochester has a unique way to counter freshman academic stress and encourage intellectual curiosity. Rochester now omits first-year grades from transcripts. The university also assigns volunteer faculty members to groups of twenty to forty students to demystify the faculty. The professors meet with the students informally and take fun outings to get to know each other.
- The University of South Carolina, the University of Nevada-Reno, and Texas A&M offer in-depth seminars on the transition to college that help students get to know one professor really well.
- MIT is putting together support teams of physicians, other health care professionals, and experienced counselors to spend time in the dorms socializing with the students and keeping an eye on them. MIT also has a comprehensive alcohol screening and education program for incoming students.
- At Johns Hopkins, every student who visits the counseling center answers a battery of questions designed to identify those who should be placed on the center's "suicide tracking" list. In a recent year, 170 of the center's 756 clients were on the list. The Hopkins staff, which includes seven psychologists and three consulting psychiatrists, meets once a week to review the students' status.
- In 2002 the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) launched a College Screen Project with second-semester freshmen at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The project is scheduled to expand to the entire student body and eventually be open to universities across the country. In this program, a screening instrument, the Student Health Questionnaire, identifies students at risk for suicide and is accessible to them on-line through a secure Web site. Students are asked about symptoms of depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, and physical symptoms. A counselor reviews each questionnaire and, based on the responses to specific questions, sends an individually tailored assessment back to the student's log-in ID. Students whose responses suggest psychological difficulties are invited to come in for a face-to-face evaluation. The AFSP and college counselors are hoping that students will react favorably to this kind of initial anonymous dialogue. (For more information about this program visit, www.afsp.org, or call 888"333-AFSP.)
All colleges must continue to examine their programs and look for better ways to serve their students. The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to suicide prevention, has partnered with several colleges and universities to study college mental health programs. This is the first intercollegiate study to determine which kinds of programs make a measurable difference in reducing stigma and helping students get into care. More of this kind of shared effort among schools is needed to pool knowledge, experiences, insights, and resources.
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Excerpted From:
From College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It Copyright © 2004 by Richard Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo. All Rights Reserved. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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