Do-it-yourself mental health: Community college students band together to pitch solutions

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For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

This story about mental health services at community colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Elijah Gregory had overcome a lot by the time he arrived at North Central Texas College in Flower Mound as a freshman at 19. He had contended with physical health issues, depression and anxiety. He had lost a parent to addiction. And he’d struggled to finish high school.

So he was proud to achieve the next step, enrolling in community college. But when Gregory got there, he felt lost and lonely. He recalls feeling so overwhelmed that he cried on the second day of school. An adviser referred him to off-campus therapists, but he still couldn’t handle his distress. He dropped out after about two weeks, he said, earning zero credits.

For two years, he saw a therapist and worked as an office assistant at his family’s steel fabrication business. When he enrolled again at 21, he was in a much better place. He took classes part time, and he made friends who have buoyed him throughout his journey.

Now 24 and a few months from graduating with an associate degree in psychology, Gregory is working to create a support group for North Central Texas College students who belong to the federally funded TRIO program, which offers mentoring, academic support and financial guidance to low-income students, first-generation students and students with disabilities. Gregory wants to help people like him fend off loneliness, build meaningful relationships with peers who may have similar life experiences, and experience a greater sense of belonging on campus.

What Gregory is trying to do is unusual. Most community colleges don’t have the resources to offer substantial mental health services to students. Yet their students need help — often more than students at four-year colleges do.

Many community college students attend school part time while juggling jobs and family caretaking responsibilities, and sometimes are struggling with basic needs like food and housing. These stressors can exacerbate students' mental health challenges, and they often have few places to turn to for help.

Gregory has joined a new program designed to empower college students themselves to identify mental health challenges or resource gaps on their campus, dream up solutions and work with campus and community leaders to implement them. Of the 65 students in the program, just 12 are from community colleges.

The program, called the Mental Health Advocacy Institute, is run by a national nonprofit, Active Minds, which advocates for college students’ mental health. Markie Pasternak, the organization’s senior manager of higher education, said the program, which began this academic year, asks students to consider a wide range of mental health issues at colleges, identify which of those affect their campuses and then work together to address the problems they’ve identified. Students receive a stipend for writing an action plan and setting it in motion on their campuses, Pasternak said. Active Minds coordinates virtual meetings among the students, who come from 58 campuses around the country, to share ideas.

More than half of community college students between the ages of 18 and 22 screened positive for at least one mental health condition, according to a study in the Psychiatric Services journal from 2021 (even before the full effects of the pandemic had settled in). But they’re far less likely to seek help than students at four-year colleges, the study found — about 25 percent compared with about 40 percent, respectively.

A 2023 survey by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin found that about 56 percent of students said mental health challenges had affected their school work for at least one day in the prior four weeks. And the academic impact was greater for those whose responses indicated that they have depression or anxiety. About 63 percent of students with depression and 58 percent of those with anxiety said it was likely that their mental health would cause them to withdraw from one or more classes, or from college altogether.

And research shows that even when students know they need help, they don’t always seek it. They often say they don’t know where to go or how to make appointments, or they’re trying to deal with their problems on their own, or they can’t afford care.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to address the mental health needs of college students, Pasternak of Active Minds said. In the Mental Health Advocacy Institute, she encourages students to think about what their communities need and what kinds of support they and their peers might benefit from.

Yaritza Garcia, a 22-year-old psychology major at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, said she wanted to supplement traditional therapy services with a peer counseling program.

“Ultimately I want this program to be as normalized as going to a group study session,” Garcia said.

Garcia drew ideas from a crisis support line for which she had done volunteer work and an in-depth online training course the organization required her to complete before she could help other people. She said that anyone who wanted to facilitate the peer counseling (ideally about a dozen of her peers) would need to take similar training courses.

She hopes counseling from peers would help students feel supported, build social connections and ultimately boost their academic performance.

Another student in the program wants to organize a support group specifically for injured student-athletes experiencing isolation and other complicated emotions because they can’t practice and compete with their teams.

At a college with a large population of international students, one student is working to translate information about mental health resources into three different languages, Pasternak said.

At a competitive research university, one student is focusing on hopefulness, rather than happiness, as the opposite of depression. Pasternak said the student wants to collect information about how hopeful students on that campus are, and then plan events designed to increase hopefulness.

The students brainstormed ideas and wrote their plans last semester, and now they’re working on bringing them to life.

Garcia is recruiting and training fellow peer counselors and hopes to begin offering the peer support service soon. By the end of the semester, she hopes to be able to collect feedback from students and figure out how to make sure the program continues after she graduates and transfers to a four-year college.

Edward F. Martinez, associate dean of students at SUNY Suffolk Community College, said when students build meaningful relationships with faculty, staff and other students, it gives them a greater sense of belonging, and that helps them stay in school longer. And working with campus leaders on projects such as the ones in the Mental Health Advocacy Institute program can also give students a sense of agency, he said.

In those meetings, staff and administrators should be transparent with students about the process for implementing their ideas and whether they think the project ideas might work, Martinez said.

“That student once again feels they belong, because somebody took the effort to have a meeting with them,” Martinez said. “Even if it didn’t work, that student would not feel they just got a ‘no.’”

Martinez said students also get a chance to understand the reasoning, and perhaps get alternative suggestions: “How about we do this instead? Something maybe the student didn’t even consider.”

The students receive support from Active Minds throughout the process. During their regular online meetings — which were weekly in the fall and are monthly this semester — they hear from guest speakers who work in various campus offices that might help with their projects, and they share information with other students, Pasternak said.

At Delaware Technical Community College, Heather Spartin, a 36-year-old nursing student, wants to support student mental health by offering rooms on campus where students can drop in and cool off.

This wouldn’t be therapy. Instead, these would be quiet rooms with low lighting where students could step in if they are having a hard day, feeling overwhelmed or just need to take a break. She said ideally there would be nursing professors available in case students needed to talk. She was inspired by Sean’s House at the University of Delaware, a nonprofit that trains peer support counselors and offers peer counseling and other resources for college students experiencing mental health challenges. It was named in honor of former student Sean Locke, who died by suicide in 2018.

As students like Elijah Gregory and others in the Active Minds program work on thinking of new ideas, Linda Garcia, the executive director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, said institutions themselves need to match that effort.

College leaders must show students how to seek help, she said, and eliminate barriers they face. Even at colleges that don’t have on-campus counseling centers, Garcia said, leaders need to make sure they can connect students to outside resources.

“It's all about how to make the information inescapable,” she said. “We need to communicate more resources to them. We need to make sure that we remove the stigma out of mental health and well-being.”

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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