The study, “National University Health Assessment,” was conducted by MSU University Health and Human Services, the department tasked with addressing this issue.
University Health and Wellbeing (UHW) was created two years ago through the consolidation of 11 different departments, said executive director Alexis Travis. UHW is comprised of four pillars, each addressing specific student needs.
“It’s really intentional to take an integrated approach to mental health, rather than everyone working in silos,” she says.
While UHW has been effective in integrating services, the numbers show that it is not enough.
To address this issue, UHW has established a committee to address suicide, with the aim of integrating more effective mental health resources and proactively engaging in advocacy efforts.
UHW hopes that this approach will not only provide students with resources, but also ensure that students are able to take advantage of them.
Tackling suicide
One of the main issues that UHW must address is the increasing suicide rate among students.
Data collected by the Office of the Dean of Students shows that last year marked the highest suicide rate on campus since it began tracking suicide rates in 2020.
Professor Travis said removing the stigma around talking about suicide was a top priority for the health and wellbeing of the university.
In coordination with her department, Travis is working with Ingham County to establish a Suicide Mortality Review Commission.
“This is actually to look at data related to MSU student suicide and understand it from a quantitative and qualitative perspective,” Travis said.
The committee hopes to begin work later this semester or early next year at the latest.
Lee Norwood, who was recently appointed executive director of Mental Health and Trauma Support Services, helped define the committee’s priorities when he came to MSU, she said.
“The university recognized the need, the community recognized the need,” she said. “But once a need is identified, you have to be able to plan what that will look like.”
Additionally, Norwood said MSU wants to include Ingham County officials, such as the health officer and coroner, in these conversations because they have more data.
Norwood said the committee’s main purpose is to determine better ways to put resources into the program. This includes determining whether a program can adequately accommodate its scope and writing a new program if necessary.
“The scope of the program can look like post-prevention, which is a resource that is utilized after someone has unfortunately committed suicide, or it can look like prevention, which is an outreach program,” she said. Ta.
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Service integration
Norwood said his top priority is to help integrate the departments he oversees. These include Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS), employee assistance programs, and survivor centers.
“MSU is big,” she said. “It’s as big as you can imagine, over 50,000 students.”
Because of this size, departments are experiencing capacity issues in meeting the needs of their students, and there is also a lack of connectivity between departments. Norwood said they are working to get these departments to work together.
CAPS Director Swapna Hingwe said the consolidation has also benefited the way CAPS cares for its students.
Students benefit from having multiple interconnected resources and departments on campus, each offering mental health services targeting different issues, Hinwe said.
“You can’t approach things with a one-size-fits-all mindset,” she says. “We really have to try to approach this problem from a more public health perspective. Gone are the days when everything was happening in an office with a clinician. They want to be involved. They want to be educated.”
Improved outreach
Hinwe said the university has taken a reactive attitude toward students since the Feb. 13, 2023, campus shooting that left three students dead and five injured.
CAPS is now aiming for a more proactive approach to its activities.
That means going to student organizations and organizing community events and workshops, which Hinwe says is made easier by the support provided under the UHW umbrella.
Hinwe places special emphasis on supporting students in poverty, she said.
Students on the margins may be reluctant to access resources and may have certain barriers or intersecting identities that make it difficult to access services while feeling safe, Hinwe explained. did. These groups include, but are not limited to, international students, LGBTQIA+ students, students of color, student parents, veterans, first-generation students, students with disabilities, and transfer students .
“If we focus on the most vulnerable students, we can actually serve everyone,” Hinwe said.
There are always challenges to working with such groups, she said. A focus on making all groups feel safe and belonging on campus will help better direct people to mental health resources.
But safety is not something that can be easily defined, Hinwe said.
“I think there are certain groups on campus that feel a lot less safe than other groups,” she says. “We’re essentially like our own city. We’re like a microcosm of what’s going on across the country. There are also incidents of bias and people feeling left out.” There are people who feel at risk.”
“Part of our job is to try to understand how to help these communities feel more of a sense of belonging while they’re here.”
Why is this happening?
Crystal Sedana, associate professor in the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Human Medicine, said people in all populations are experiencing mental health crises. College students are just one of the many demographics affected.
She said factors that influence students’ mental health span the individual, relationship, community, policy and societal levels. When each level is combined in daily life, a perfect storm is created.
“If you think about today’s college students, they’re experiencing large-scale natural and man-made disasters,” Cederna said.
These include social unrest on and off campus, legal violations of bodily autonomy and medical decision-making, war, traumatic events, death and grief in the wake of COVID-19, and the lives of many marginalized people. This includes, but is not limited to, continued injustice and discrimination that targets cultural identities.
The aftereffects of the February 2023 campus shooting are still being felt by those affected.
“If it causes a trauma-level reaction in someone, the body doesn’t forget those types of events quickly,” she said.
A future threat similar to that event could trigger a physiological response in someone, Sederna said. Because the body is trying to keep itself safe, people become more alert to their surroundings and may interpret neutral things in a worrying or protective way.
“It’s like the fire alarm system becomes very sensitive to smoke, and sometimes it will issue an alarm out of an abundance of caution in self-protection when there’s not even any smoke,” she says.
These stressors can increase a person’s “cognitive load,” which makes it difficult to “cope with the stressors that come with college life,” Cederna said.
This creates a ripple effect, increasing students’ feelings of anxiety and hopelessness.
“This level of stress that college students are experiencing requires an unprecedented amount of resources,” she says. “Simply put, demand far exceeds what we can currently supply.”
Sederna said marginalized students may ignore resources due to mistrust caused by discrimination and injustice they have experienced in the past.
“In many cases, even unconsciously, our systems continue to perpetuate differences in treatment, in how we perceive problems and how we approach management, and that is the effect of implicit bias,” Cederna said. said.
Additionally, many mental health providers are unaware of the cultural identities and lived experiences of certain subpopulations, Cederna said.
“The more we can get a workforce that matches the cultural identities, lived experiences, and needs of college students, the more likely they are to join the college,” she says.
Given these stressors, students can take care of themselves through self-reflection, Sederna said. Unstable moods and consistent anxiety are red flags that indicate you should seek help through professional channels, colleagues, or social connections.
“Reaching out to resources on college campuses is the best thing they can do,” she says.
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