Looking to Improve Students’ Mental Health? Ask What They Need

Last year Katy Troester-Trate distributed Thanksgiving baskets overflowing with cans of cranberry sauce, dressing and biscuit mixes, green beans, and a gift card for a turkey to students.

Though handing out food may seem outside the usual job description for an interim dean of students, this is just one her many efforts to improve mental health on campus.

When she started Jefferson Community College’s Health and Wellness Center in 2012, she knew that depression and anxiety were just two issues that she’d end up helping students sort through. Some of her students were hungry, others were struggling to make ends meet. The list went on from there.

Troester-Trate started her program in a closetlike office at the State University of New York’s Jefferson Community College, in Watertown, with 50 student patients who needed mental-health care. The program now conducts almost 1,000 sessions a year in its own building, which opened in 2017.

Jefferson Community College is one of seven institutions given the Healthy Campus Award from Active Minds, a nonprofit organization focused on mental-health awareness and action. The award recognizes institutions for championing student voices, offering equal opportunity for health, and providing resources and clinical services.

One in three students has at least one mental-health disorder, according to a 2017 report by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. This statistic is often thrown around on college campuses, but helping students through these challenges is complicated. Campuses like Jefferson Community College are thinking about mental health as a part of a students’ overall well-being. That often means providing services that are outside the traditional mental-health realm.

Jefferson Community College has a tight budget and only two years to invest in students, but that didn’t matter to Troester-Trate. Success starts with listening to what the students need, she said. “It’s not just mental health these students are struggling with,” she said. “It’s never just one thing.”

Her students needed food. The college started a food pantry. They needed transportation. She provided bus tickets and works with a local nonprofit transportation service that bills the center per mile. They needed options for child care. She hands out vouchers worth up to three hours of care at a local drop-in daycare center.

“If we don’t meet the basic needs of students, we can’t hope to meet the higher-level needs,” Troester-Trate said. “If a student comes in having not eaten dinner the night before, how do you expect that student to work on depression and anxiety or bigger life goals — finishing a degree — if they are hungry?”

Asking students what keeps them up at night leads to actual change, she said.

Campus Involvement

That requires an “all-in” approach from an institution.

“The whole university should be involved in supporting student well-being — especially mental health,” said Laura Horne, director of programs for Active Minds. “It should not be seen as the sole responsibility of the mental-health center.”

Universities like Kent State University have made mental health and wellness a priority in the institution’s strategic plan, Horne said. Symbolic efforts to involve students, like a seat on a planning council, are not enough.

“If the people making the decisions about mental health are not working with the students, they don’t always hear that piece,” Troester-Trate said. The administration “needs to be in touch with their campus.”

Another common pitfall is an underreliance on students and data, Horne said.

The University of South Florida knows what their students are struggling with before they even start on campus, said Rita DeBate, associate vice president for health and wellness. Students take a mandatory mental-health-literacy training course during orientation where they learn about signs, symptoms, and how to approach personal struggles, as well as those of loved ones.

The data collected through the training course has allowed the campus to design a three-tier approach to student well-being. The three tiers cover a spectrum of cases, from the faculty member faced with a student in need to the student with serious mental-health problems.

The college is also working to make mental-health-literacy training mandatory for all faculty and staff, DeBate said. Now it’s just highly recommended.

Student mental health and well-being is the responsibility of the entire campus community, not just the counseling center, DeBate said. Her institution hired a mental-health outreach specialist to assist faculty members and staff on a case-by-case basis.

And expanding mental-health resources across the campus — sharing the responsibility with other departments — is not a rarity. The University of Iowa has a counseling office in Catlett Hall, a dormitory with close proximity to a majority of students living on campus.

Duke University, on the other hand, merged all its health and wellness services into one location.

“There is more than one way to do this work the right way,” Horne said.

And the changes, big or small, often go back to listening to students’ needs. Small touches, like including mental-health resources on a course syllabus or making assignments due at 5 p.m. rather than midnight to encourage sleep, can help, Horne said.

A misstep for campus mental-health efforts is believing that one size fits all.

“A lot of schools — even those who are doing really well in addressing student health and prioritizing it — are not always communicating well back to the student body about what they are doing,” Horne said. “I think a lot of this takes time, but it goes a long way for a university to better communicate.”

It takes time and flexibility, Troester-Trate said, but the university — the administrators — have to be dedicated to what will pay off for students.

“Watching them walk down the aisle at graduation because you’ve helped them, not just with the mental-health piece, but with the life piece,” Troester-Trate said, “that’s success.”

Follow Lily Jackson on Twitter at @lilygjack, or email her at lily.jackson@chronicle.com.