Drop-in counseling for Black students. Therapy groups on coping with racism. Programs for white students on how to be anti-racist.
As the pandemic and the racial-injustice crisis continue to take a toll on Black people and other marginalized groups, colleges face a newfound urgency to support the mental health of students of color.
Just about every survey conducted since the beginning of March indicates that student distress is only going to get worse this fall. Those mental-health concerns will be exacerbated for Black and Hispanic students, whose populations are disproportionately harmed by Covid-19 and by the police violence gripping the nation’s consciousness. Asian American students, meanwhile, are dealing with racial slurs and jokes stemming from the pandemic’s origins in China.
What’s more, students of color often don’t get the help they need. About 45 percent of white students with mental-health challenges seek treatment, according to a 2018 study, but only a third of Latinx students do so. For Black and Asian students, the proportion is even lower — about 25 and 22 percent, respectively.
And this fall, they will return to colleges that look and feel very different. Putting distressed students on a two-week waiting list for therapy sessions won’t cut it, mental-health experts say.
In the throes of dual national crises, students of color will need quick access to mental-health-care options that reflect their experiences, recreate their support systems remotely, and acknowledge the physical and emotional tolls the past few months have taken.
Culturally Competent Counseling
As Alexa Sass, a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, was finishing up the spring term, George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, and protests against racial injustice exploded nationwide. Processing the news was overwhelming and exhausting for Sass, who identifies as Black and Filipino.
She tried to get through her final exams as best she could. She turned to books on spirituality. She leaned on her communities within UCLA and back home in the Bay Area — virtually, of course. She has tried out some of the university’s online mental-health resources, but they’re not what she really needs.
Without much in-person interaction, she’s struggling emotionally. “The way that I process my mental health is through support systems,” said Sass, a leader in the campus chapter of Active Minds, a national mental-health advocacy group.
The pandemic and the racial-injustice crisis have caused fear, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness in Black students, said Kayla Johnson, a staff psychologist at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black institution in Texas. But those students don’t often use mental-health services, because of stigma.
For some Black people, Johnson said, going to a therapist means that something must be wrong with you, or that you don’t have enough faith in God. There’s also pressure to keep problems to yourself, she said: “There’s kind of a level of secrecy about things that happen.”
Not only are there cultural barriers that discourage many students of color from talking openly about mental health, but they also encounter a staff of campus therapists many of whom don’t look like them, said Annelle Primm, a senior medical adviser at the Steve Fund, a mental-health-support organization for young people of color. Some students, she said, make the calculation that “it’s best not to seek help if they can’t seek help from someone with whom they feel comfortable sharing such personal feelings.”
At predominantly white institutions, counseling-staff members often don’t know how to talk with Black students, Johnson added. Sometimes, she said, students end up taking time out of their therapy sessions to explain social, economic, and cultural problems affecting Black families to their white therapists.
“Of course, when that happens, you don’t want to come back,” she said.
This fall, making sure students of color can connect with culturally competent mental-health providers will be key, mental-health experts say.
Before Stacia Alexander arrived at Paul Quinn College, in 2018, the historically black institution in Texas had a mental-health provider on campus for only a few hours each week, from the nearby University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Once Alexander took over as the college’s first mental-health-clinic coordinator, she tried a direct form of outreach: She handed out her cellphone number to students at orientation and told them to text her when they were having a bad day. One of the biggest barriers to accessing care, she said, is that students don’t know where to go.
It worked. And many students told her how excited they were to have a Black therapist to talk with.
But students were texting her all night, she said. So, earlier this year, Paul Quinn joined with TimelyMD, a teletherapy company, to ease the burden. Now students can reach a therapist 24/7 through the TimelyMD app, which offers access to providers from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.
No More Two-Week Waits
Accessibility, experts say, should be another top priority for colleges trying to better reach students of color with mental-health resources.
Dozens of colleges, including George Washington University, Texas A&M University, and Mississippi State University, are offering quick drop-in consultations with therapists meant for students of color. The program, known as “Let’s Talk,” typically is set up at different locations across campus during a given week, often in student unions or cultural centers. For now, the drop-in sessions are happening virtually.
Brown University’s counseling center uses a flexible-care model, in which most students are served through 25-30-minute sessions that they can schedule just once, or as often as they want. Continuing 50-minute counseling appointments reflect a Western-centric care approach that doesn’t appeal to many students of color, said Will Meek, director of counseling and psychological services.
Since March, he said, no Brown student has waited more than a day to see one of the university’s campus therapists, a staff that Meek describes as culturally diverse. The university uses a third party to further expand access.
When Brown students call the counseling center with an urgent request, a clinician from ProtoCall, a 24/7 crisis line that works with colleges, will pick up the phone. The clinician will talk with the student and report back to Brown’s counseling staff. Often students just want to talk with someone for a few minutes without even making an appointment, Meek said.
To prepare for the fall, he has also been rethinking outreach to students of color. For instance, instead of waiting for students to contact the counseling center, he’s hoping to have them opt in to a program in which a staff therapist can contact them directly and connect one-on-one.
At UCLA, which has 45,000 students, there can be long wait times for therapy, said Sass, the junior there. But there are other places that students of color can turn for mental-health support, she said. There’s the RISE Center, which stands for “resilience in your student experience.” There’s an academic-support program for Black students, where Sass serves as a trained peer counselor who helps other students with both academics and life stressors.
UCLA leaders, she said, just need to make sure students know where they can find help.
Anti-Racism as Wellness
At Loyola University Maryland, Jason Parcover, director of the counseling center, is also trying to offer a menu of flexible, accessible resources for students. But beyond that, he’s creating spaces for white students to learn how to tackle racial injustice. “Our marginalized students are telling us that they want to see action,” he said.
The conversations, as Loyola calls them, will help students understand how to be anti-racist, to “make a commitment to taking specific actions, and to hold each other accountable for following through with those actions,” he said. The programs fit squarely into Loyola’s values as a Jesuit institution, he said, and into the counseling center’s mission.
“Investing in anti-racism efforts includes really acknowledging and understanding deeply that we are all in this together, and that our health in all forms, including our mental health, is connected to how other members of our community are faring,” Parcover said. “By definition, anti-racism work is mental-health and wellness work.”
Counseling centers should “name the issues,” he said. In public communications, campus mental-health staff members should be specific about what’s going on in the world and talk about the impact of trauma on mental health.
Educating white students about being effective allies should be a core part of any campus strategy to support the well-being of students of color, said Erin McClintock, a former campus therapist and director of wellness at Clark University who’s now senior director of impact and education at EverFi, a company that provides students with online training in alcohol, sexual misconduct, and mental health.
Socially conscious students are going to return to campuses this fall wanting to act against racial injustice, she said — but if they want to become good allies, they can’t psychologically burden Black students while they take on that work. “People of color don’t need to be the ones who are validating their white peers,” she said.
An Ounce of Prevention
Creating a culture of well-being is not just about what the counseling center is doing, McClintock said. Colleges can stop personal crises before they happen by helping students who are experiencing “subclinical” issues — distress that’s not yet a mental-health disorder but affects their ability to function. That means investing in food pantries and emergency financial aid so that low-income students, who are disproportionately people of color, don’t have to stress as much about basic needs, she said.
Some colleges are turning to online platforms to try to reach students before they spiral into anxiety or depression. More than 120 institutions are offering You at College, which compiles mental-health and well-being resources tailored to campuses.
Nathaan Demers, a former campus psychologist who’s now vice president and director of clinical programs at Grit Digital Health, which worked with Colorado State University to develop You at College three years ago, said students’ use of the platform increased by 153 percent in the first five weeks of the pandemic compared with the previous three months.
The platform recently added resources that address the racial-injustice crisis, on how to make one’s voice heard effectively and how to maintain self-care as an activist. California State University at Fullerton conducted a study this spring and found that students of color used the You at College platform at a higher rate than white students did, Demers said.
Students can use You at College on their phones, and they can do so privately, which is especially important for students who are staying with their families and wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking with a therapist in that environment, he said.
By definition, anti-racism work is mental-health and wellness work.
With prevention in mind, California State University at Sacramento added mental-health sessions for parents to its virtual new-student orientation this summer — including in Spanish and Gujarati, a language spoken in India.
More than 70 percent of Sacramento State students are nonwhite, and many come from cultural backgrounds where mental health isn’t discussed openly, said Lara Falkenstein, a campus health educator who advises the university’s Active Minds chapter. As students learn online this fall and continue to spend much of their time at home, she said, the university wants to make sure that families can have conversations about emotional well-being and look out for potential signs of distress.
Sacramento State is also beginning a two-year, grant-funded research project on the mental health of students of color that will examine what they need and where the university needs to improve, said Reva Wittenberg, associate director for campus wellness.
Like many fields, therapy and wellness work “were originally developed through a white lens and a white framework,” she said. “It’s our challenge to shift that — to really take into account the experiences and needs of students from different communities.”
At Prairie View A&M, more of the counseling center’s therapy groups, workshops, and other outreach programs will focus on coping with racial injustice and giving students a space to process what they’ve been going through. “For Black America,” said Kayla Johnson, the staff psychologist, “we heal and cope by getting together.” She is heartened to see more Black students talking openly about mental health on social media and other platforms.
Black students’ well-being this fall, she added, will also depend on their institutions’ taking a strong stance against racial injustice. Otherwise, how will students be able to feel safe on campus? “I think schools need to step up and say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We see what’s happening. We support you,’” she said.
Meera Varma, a UCLA junior and a leader in the campus Active Minds chapter, emphasized that colleges should offer support and academic flexibility in recognition of the toll that activism can take on mental health, particularly for Black students.
“This fire, this passion from our students isn’t going to die down anytime soon,” she said. This fall, “it’s really important to understand that school education might not be students’ first priority.”
