Sacred Heart addresses mental health as ‘the most pressing need on campus’
FAIRFIELD — Larry Wielk, Sacred Heart University’s dean of students, has seen more students request leaves of absence connected to mental health in the past year and a half than the past three to five years.
While mental health issues existed before the pandemic, Wielk estimates the needs have tripled since COVID, especially anxiety. Other universities and colleges are also seeing an uptick in this need.
“It’s been the most pressing need on campus,” he said.
It’s one of the reasons the university is taking a closer look at mental health needs on campus and how to address them with a dovetailed approach. SHU recently formed a coalition and launched new partnership with the Jed Foundation — a national nonprofit, suicideprevention program focused on teens and young adults, which will help create a plan.
Several things lined up for SHU’s deep look at the offerings and what can be done to better serve students on campus.
A new state law was passed last year, requiring campuses to have mental health coalitions and create a plan to identify and address gaps in service. SHU’s coalition held its kickoff meeting on Tuesday and plans to meet monthly as a permanent group, though the makeup might change as people come and go. It currently has about 18 members — a mix of students, faculty and staff.
“It’s pretty much every aspect of the campus community,” Wielk said.
Around the same time, the previous counseling director had retired after more than 20 years, which gave officials the idea to hire the Jed Foundation to partner with the university to create a strategic plan for mental health needs.
The foundation will complete a baseline assessment that looks at what is already offered and students’ needs. It also gives SHU access to the foundation’s databases, national research and other schools it works with.
Wielk said the university’s 6,100 undergraduate students had generally been the primary focus and this study will help identify and meet the needs of students who might not have been as served before, such as parttime or graduate students.
The foundation will work with the coalition and campus at large to craft a strategic plan for the next three or four years. This could include building upon existing programs or creating new ones.
Part of this effort includes administering a survey in late March. The foundation will get the results over the summer and will then come to campus in the fall to meet with the coalition and hold student focus groups.
Wielk estimates the plan could be completed next academic year and start to be implemented in spring 2023. There is a chance certain elements could be introduced sooner based on what they learn, he said.
“We need to let the process play out and see if our need is actually our need,” he said.
He said he wants to do more with education. This could include speakers, and build on the peer educator program.
“If we can be proactive with our campus community, that is key, rather than being reactive,” Wielk said.
Mental health issues aren’t something new on college campus, though Wielk said students are more open about talking about it, helping bring the issues to the forefront.
He said when he started working in higher education, it was taboo for students to discuss any mental health things. The good news is now students will come to the university and say they have been seeing a therapist for a couple of years and would like to continue that service on campus, he said.
The pandemic has exacerbated the mental health challenges though, creating more “significant issues” students are dealing with, including more suicide ideation, Wielk said.
“Over the past few years, as we have dealt with the COVID pandemic, we also have witnessed a significant increase in mental health issues among the members of our community,” said University President John J. Petillo. “In fact, many say that mental health is the next campus-wide epidemic that those of us in higher education must be prepared to deal with to move past the pandemic and best serve the needs of our student populations.”
The biggest issue on campus is student anxiety. Wielk said part of the cause even before the pandemic was the pressure on students to succeed.
He said the pandemic seems to have a bigger impact on freshmen and sophomores who spent the past two years learning online away from their peers and now are going to college.
Wielk said it’s hard to pinpoint how many student wellness programs the university already offers because some are more embedded or continuous, while others might be one-off programs. He said they’re also introducing support groups as needs arise, such as one for students who might have lost a family member that semester.
One of the school’s more detailed offerings is a pilot program for student athletes where a member of the counseling team is embedded in the athletic department. It helps student athletes who might be injured and so away from their teams and the strong connections they have on campus. It also helps student athletes deal with the pressures they face.