Tackling mental-health challenges on campus
Classes on cooking, self-care among creative solutions offered by universities to help students
Grandmas teaching online cooking classes, virtual speed “friending” sessions, free self-care and resiliency courses, even collegiate e-sports leagues. These are just some of the unique initiatives being offered at colleges and universities across Canada, aiming to improve mental-health outcomes for students by looking beyond the campus counsellor.
The need to create more robust mental-health programming at post-secondary schools isn’t new, but 18 months (and counting) of pandemic uncertainty has left students from coast to coast disconnected from their campus community and struggling with virtual learning burnout, grief and loss, financial stress, housing insecurity and isolation.
“The number of students reporting anxiety and depression is way up even from five years ago, and when we look at the numbers during COVID, they skyrocketed again,” says Marija Padjen, director of the Centre for Innovation in Campus Mental Health, a collaboration of five Ontario organizations representing student unions, colleges, universities and community mental health.
Padjen says the pandemic has had a huge impact on mental-health outcomes for students, creating a greater impetus to look for innovation and meaningful solutions. The good news is many post-secondary institutions are discovering new and more flexible ways to better support students from the classroom (virtual or otherwise) to the dorm room, and everywhere in between.
Some of the more unique programming has involved collaborations between schools and community groups, such as a cooking class out of the University of Guelph. Ingredients were sent to students, and classes featured an interactive cooking lesson, followed by breakout rooms where students could share their meal while discussing mental-health topics.
At Queen’s University, the Cooking With Grammas events offered students a way to learn cooking skills and have a socially distant meal with others. It also helped address issues around food security, and provided the kind of comfort you can only get from … grandmothers. And Wilfrid Laurier’s free self-care course helps students tap into their own resiliency and better learn how to cope with stress and hardship.
“One of the frustrations we hear is there’s a lack of awareness of what services are (available on campus) and how to access those supports,” says Ed Mantler, vice-president of programs and priorities with the Mental Health Commission of Canada. To address this problem, schools such as Concordia and McGill have instituted student wellness hubs, which function as a one-stop shop in bringing supports together, making a variety of services much more accessible to students.
Another program out of Memorial University in Newfoundland has drastically reduced long wait lists for clinical mental-health supports by creating a sort of triage system called Stepped Care 2.0. “It’s a model of care that … matches the student with the type of support that meets their immediate needs,” explains Mantler. That might entail providing information, tools or peer support prior to — or instead of — speaking with a counsellor.
“Not all of those resources are traditional face-to-face services,” Mantler says. “Many of them are online tools or apps, so that gives some freedom of choice.” That model has been instrumental in drastically reducing the wait time for services, and has been so successful that it’s now being adopted off campus and in other provinces.
Making clinical resources available is so important, but it’s not a silver bullet,” Mantler says. “There’s a lot of upstream work that can be done in terms of … making campus a place that promotes mental health and well-being, and considers the stressors that might be detrimental to students.”
The University of Calgary in particular, he says, has done a great job at integrating well-being into the teaching, learning, classroom style and campus culture as a whole. In the end, some of these examples will endure through COVID and move forward into the post-pandemic era.
The Healthy Minds | Healthy Campuses (HM|HC) support team at CMHA British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research echoed this sentiment. It’s important to think of mental-health support in broader terms than just formal programming, says the team at HM|HC. That means looking at things like flexible course syllabi, classroom arrangement and setup, as well as having instructors and support staff available to meet with students and offering study aids, financial support and volunteer and employment opportunities — all of which are important aspects of mental health and well-being on campus.
Padjen says the next six months to a year are going to be a time of transition, and that we shouldn’t lose sight of the growth students have made along the way.
“There is no perfect road map,” she says. “We just have to be patient with each other, and also with ourselves. Seek support, ask how we are doing, and support each other. There’s been a great rallying of people coming together, so my hope is that continues.”