Sunday, April 19, 2020

Extra Credit Documentary: College Students and Mental Health: Confronting an Emerging Crisis


For this assignment, I watched College Students and Mental Health: Confronting an Emerging Crisis. This was an event presented by The Harvard School of Public Health and Huffpost. They invited several mental health experts to discuss the mental health crisis going on in America. This Q&A session will be useful for my research because it focused on mental health on college campuses. One thing in particular that will be helpful is the Active Minds Organizations that this forum pointed me too. The Active Minds organization is a national organization that supports mental health awareness on college campuses. 
The most important quote from this forum is from Michelle Williams, Dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She tells us that, “The increasing demands in some settings you know more than a third increase in demand for services. There are many of our campuses that are just unprepared to meet the demands for service and I applaud our students for reaching out for those services but we’ve not caught up and so we really have to do two things. One is to look through the public health lens and think about health promotion to find ways to engage those students who are experiencing stress but not the clinically severe forms of mental distress and mental health issues to avoid over medicalizing what some of the symptoms of stress are and allow for triaging the kinds of care like talk therapy, the other interventions that you’ve heard about available and make sure then that the higher level of support for students suffering at the higher end of the spectrum for health care needs are able to access other services in a timely way and not experience the long waiting periods that so many of us have been hearing about on some campuses” (Michelle Williams). This quote will be useful because she is telling us that universities are not meeting the demand for services, just like my other research has shown. She also noted that we need to make resources more available for students dealing with stress so then the students who are experiencing severe mental illness will be seen sooner. 
This Q&A can be watched at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--H18dT8QQ

1 comment:

  1. Looks interesting.

    You have 19 points and will have one additional point when you complete the final post #10 with your Abstract and Works Cited.

    (You appear not to have made the post for Lit Review #3).

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