What the Woods Do for Stressed Students

Lindsay France, Cornell U.

Not often do a psychologist and a horticulturist hit upon the same good idea. But Donald A. Rakow and Gregory T. Eells are convinced that they did, and they write about it in their brief Nature Rx: Improving College-Student Mental Health (Comstock Publishing Associates/Cornell University Press, 2019).

They describe how colleges can use their campuses’ natural settings to combat a common problem — unhealthy stress among students and employees. The authors take their cue from a movement that has gained momentum in some American cities through such programs as Park Rx, which began in 2010 in Washington. There a pediatrician, Robert Zarr, and his colleagues encouraged citizens to step out into natural settings, and urged health practitioners to prescribe such activities as health remedies.

“There is an incredibly impressive body of scientific evidence now that verifies the psychological, physical, and behavioral benefits of time spent in nature,” says Rakow, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University. He and Eells, who in March moved from being Cornell’s director of counseling and psychological services to being executive director of such services at the University of Pennsylvania, say Nature Rx approaches can reduce rates of anxiety and depression, which are high and rising on campuses.

An American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment in 2015 found that more than one-third of college students had suffered from depression in the previous year and three-fifths had experienced “overwhelming anxiety.” Rakow and Eells surmise that students have become “increasingly disconnected from our roots in the natural world,” and with that have lost the “sense of compatibility and discovery” and thus the stress reduction and “attention restoration” that nature can provide.

The Nature Rx approach, they say, can help campus officials and health-care practitioners to tackle stress and its outcomes by making use of campus green spaces, which are often vast and in many cases large enough for strolling and creating gardens. They suggest that colleges’ Nature Rx programs could include components like the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — as well as off-campus wilderness-adventure activities that build resilience. Even simply tilling a campus garden can reap health benefits, the authors say; they cite studies that found that interacting with the soil can strengthen the human immune system.

Rakow and Eells say that even though the Nature Rx movement is growing in cities around the world, only about a dozen colleges have formal programs. The book discusses various approaches, including Cornell’s. Students and others there can avail themselves of a variety of activities, and advocates like Rakow have encouraged campus health providers to write students prescriptions to “spend time in nature” as part of their overall health plan. In response, 15 health practitioners during the 2018-19 academic year provided nearly 500 “nature prescriptions.” “Psychiatrists, physicians, and nurses, rather than resisting this idea, are really embracing it,” says Rakow.

The authors provide a step-by-step guide to constructing, sustaining, and evaluating Nature Rx programs, including organizing participants, making an inventory of green spaces, and working in partnership with health and counseling personnel.

Just make sure participants put away their cellphones during the activities, the authors advise. And bear in mind, as Rakow says, that some students are hard to reach.

If that results from severe mental-health conditions, he says, “we are the first to point out that Nature Rx should be complementary to other treatments.”

As for alerting students that cramming and not sleeping are unwise, Eells says Nature Rx programs should convey such home truths as that spending time in nature can recharge energies: “You can go back to the classic ‘If you’re going to cut down a tree, aren’t you going to sharpen your saw, first?’”

Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.