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To Help Students Heal After Hate, Meet Them Where They Are

By  Brianna Tucker and 
Clara Turnage
August 25, 2017

When students walked back onto campus at the University of Virginia this week, they may have retraced the footsteps of a torch-carrying mob that came just weeks before. As they venture downtown for an afternoon on the red-brick plaza, they may walk where the activist Heather D. Heyer was killed.

They may have been gone only for a summer, said Nicole Ruzek, director of counseling and psychological services at UVa, but everything has changed.

“Just seeing that their community has been violated in a way they had not expected it could be violated can be triggering,” Ms. Ruzek said. People have said that when they go downtown, “they notice that their bodies feel different. It just doesn’t feel the same as before.”

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When students walked back onto campus at the University of Virginia this week, they may have retraced the footsteps of a torch-carrying mob that came just weeks before. As they venture downtown for an afternoon on the red-brick plaza, they may walk where the activist Heather D. Heyer was killed.

They may have been gone only for a summer, said Nicole Ruzek, director of counseling and psychological services at UVa, but everything has changed.

“Just seeing that their community has been violated in a way they had not expected it could be violated can be triggering,” Ms. Ruzek said. People have said that when they go downtown, “they notice that their bodies feel different. It just doesn’t feel the same as before.”

Ms. Ruzek said the counseling center on Virginia’s campus is preparing for a wave of students who may not understand the lasting effects of trauma they’re feeling, which can lead to real mental-health illnesses if left untreated. And that trauma might not be limited to students who were at “ground zero” during the deadly violence. Some people’s reactions can flow from simply seeing spaces that had once felt safe become dangerous.

When someone is threatened, she said, they can often respond with a fight, flight, or freeze reaction that continues to affect the nervous system for months.

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The counseling center on Virginia’s campus is preparing for a wave of students who may not understand the lasting effects of trauma they’re feeling, which can lead to real mental-health illnesses if left untreated.

Some students may develop anxiety or depression, hypervigilance or insomnia. Others may have the opposite reaction, becoming numb and detached. Both types of those responses, she said, are symptoms associated with trauma.

Counselors might also find themselves struggling to reach the people who might need them most. That’s a problem that other universities have faced after experiencing violence associated with racial issues.

So Ms. Ruzek and other counseling experts suggested one way to tackle that problem: Seek out the students who may be the most vulnerable.

The university counseling center formed a trauma recovery group that is intended to teach coping skills to students. The group will focus this semester in part on overcoming racial violence.

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“The best thing anyone can do is just ask how they’re doing,” she said. “Let them know you’re there to help them get connected to the help they need.”

Cultural Sensitivity Is Key

After what happened in Charlottesville, Monnica Williams received two emails. One was from the president of the University of Connecticut, where she is a clinical psychologist. The other was from her alma mater, UVa. Each, she said, explained the university’s commitment to safety and denounced the white supremacists who stormed UVa’s campus.

But those messages, she said, “didn’t make me feel safer.”

Ms. Williams, who considers the gathering of white supremacists at UVa an act of terror, said the group should never have been allowed on campus. She said that if UVa’s administration doesn’t understand the threat such extremists posed to nonwhite students and build strong anti-racist policies, then “people of color are going to continue to feel marginalized and disempowered.”

The Far Right Comes to Campus
Read a collection of Chronicle articles documenting the challenges posed by the growing presence of extremist politics at colleges and universities.
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In a similar vein, Ms. Williams said, psychologists who seek to help traumatized students will be less effective if they don’t fully understand the students’ cultures.

“It’s a big problem in our field that a lot of therapists don’t have the training or experience to know how to navigate racially charged issues,” she said.

Perhaps more concerning, she said, is the lack of empirically researched treatment for those who experience racism. “We can give people coping skills, and certainly that’s something that we do,” she said.

In the absence of a proven treatment for those who have suffered a form of racial trauma, Ms. Williams said she has tried to tailor therapy to the culture of the patient. Sometimes this can just mean pairing patients with people from similar ethnic backgrounds. Sometimes it’s as overt as producing “targeted advertisements about what the counseling center has to offer students who are feeling traumatized as a result of racism,” she said.

After a series of police shootings of African-American men and women in the summer of 2016, Allen H. O’Barr said he wanted to reach out to students on his campus who might be experiencing trauma. But Dr. O’Barr, who is director of counseling services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said students told him: “We don’t want to see you in the counseling center. We want you to come where we are. We want to see that people who represent who we are are on your staff.”

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Counselors and psychologists began attending events with student organizations and multicultural groups. As trust grew, the students became more willing to attend group therapy sessions and counseling.

And after Charlottesville, Dr. O’Barr said he began planning again to reach out to students where they most feel safe.

“It’s trying to meet each person where they are and help them process the distress that’s going on,” he said. “We have started doing that, and we’ve come a long way.”

‘We Have to Start Preparing Early’

President David Wilson of Morgan State University, in Baltimore, said he wanted to take the conversation to his students personally. In an email to the campus, Mr. Wilson announced a teach-in, seeking to open a dialogue on race and racism in America.

“We knew we needed to move forward and to plan an activity that would speak about these issues in a thoughtful way, in a probing manner and with great clarity,” he said.

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Mr. Wilson said it was in the university tradition to keep history in front of students so they can understand how activism led to the changes spurred by the civil-rights movement.

But with the potential threat of extremists looming ever closer, students of color may feel distressed whether incidents like Charlottesville happen in front of them or miles away.

“We can’t assume our institutions are not in someone’s cross hairs,” he said. “We have to start preparing early and know how the university will respond if indeed you look up and someone is headed to your campus to do harm.”

Mr. Wilson said while his university has begun to form support groups, administrators are also encouraging people to talk about race and self care in the classroom.

“Our students are struggling with these issues,” he said. “They want to make sure that this country will always reflect the totality of their experience.”

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His message to them is simple: “Make no doubt about it, you are America. You are at the epicenter of this country. And you must not be deterred.”

Classes are back in session at the University of Virginia, and counselors have begun attending multicultural events in an effort to reach students. Ms. Ruzek said she hopes putting a human face on the counseling center will encourage students to reach out as they need.

Healing from a trauma like the one UVa endured, however, is a shared responsibility, she said. The counseling center can treat the effects of racial violence but it has no power to stop hateful incidents and the harm they cause.

“We need to remember that this isn’t just about sending an individual to counseling,” she said. “This is really about having a conversation community-wide.”

A version of this article appeared in the September 8, 2017, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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