Building preventive mental health skills on campus

This article is authored by Shalini Sharma, director, Wellness, Plaksha University.

When a student is struggling, one of the first questions that often comes up is, “Where can we send them for counselling?”

World Mental Health Day (HT File)

Counselling and professional mental health support are essential parts of any campus wellness system. However, as someone working closely with young people on a campus, I often find myself wondering if there is another question we should be asking as well: What can we do before a student reaches the point where they need intensive help?

This shift in thinking is at the heart of preventive mental health.

A campus is not only a place where young people learn academic concepts. It is also where they are learning how to deal with uncertainty, relationships, failure, conflict, independence and most importantly themselves. If we accept that, then mental health cannot remain something we address only when something goes wrong. It also needs to be something we learn and practise along the way.

For a long time, mental health support on campuses has largely been understood through a corrective lens: a student has a problem, the student seeks help, and a professional provides support. We certainly need this. But there is another side to the picture.

Two ideas can be held together, where building preventive skills is seen as important as providing corrective interventions. This means creating opportunities for students to understand emotions, develop coping skills and navigate transitions, while also ensuring that individual counselling is available when students need a safe space to make sense of distress and uncertainty.

Students arrive on campus carrying much more than their academic aspirations. Feelings of being left behind, social comparisons, friendships, identity, loneliness which are not distractions from education but are a part of growing up. College experience thus can be a practice ground within healthy limits where young people develop the capacities to handle life.

This is where preventive work becomes meaningful. Group sessions on handling transitions, managing emotions and mood check-in during the day can help prioritise problems into bite-size, manageable pieces and can desensitize students to the idea that they have to do it all. Introductory psychology courses can go a long way to share with students how they may apply research insights on emotion regulation, learning and memory, to their lives.

Many young people worry that admitting they are struggling means they are weak, unstable or somehow unable to cope. There can be a quiet pressure to figure everything out on their own. When we can name things, talk about them, have conversations about our feelings it becomes less scary, less overwhelming and more manageable.

Preventive mental health also asks us to look beyond the wellness or counselling team.

Not every discussion about grief, anxiety or relationships needs to happen in a counselling room. Sometimes it can begin as a conversation with a faculty member, trusted adults on campus or with a trained peer support buddy. We are not meant to go through every difficult experience alone. This does not mean that everyone needs to become a therapist. Far from it.

It means creating a campus where caring and trusted adults know how to notice when something may be changing, how to have a simple, non-judgmental conversation and, importantly, where to refer a student when professional support is needed. Campuses can assure that medical history forms include mental health information. Identifying students at risk and supporting help seeking need not rest only with mental health professionals alone. It needs to be a campus-wide effort.

Sometimes, the most important intervention is simply another adult noticing.

A focus on our mental well-being need not be limited to only workshops and webinars, it needs to make its way in to classes and educators' interactions with students. Faculty can be encouraged to let students know that any mental health struggles they are facing are just as legitimate as physical illnesses. Both are real struggles that will be taken seriously. This can create a more comfortable environment for students to raise mental health concerns.

Educators could be encouraged to share snippets of how they look after their emotional well-being and deal with various stressors. This does not mean turning every class into a therapy session. It could be as simple as beginning a class with a brief check-in, a mindfulness practice, or introducing some fun movement during a longer duration class.

Prevention also means creating more awareness around perceptions and messages students receive about drinking, substance use, socialising and what is considered ‘normal’ college experience. We need to ask if there are enough healthy social, recreational and extracurricular opportunities? Are campus policies around substance use clear and consistently followed?

A preventive approach therefore includes creating a campus where students have healthy ways to connect, spend time, have fun and seek support and where risks are taken seriously rather than normalised.

The response a student who is struggling receives from the adults around them can either reinforce shame or make it easier to reach out.

There is a difference between telling a student, “You need counselling because something is wrong,” and saying, “It sounds like you are going through a difficult time. You don't have to figure it out alone. Would you like some support?” The second conversation does not take away the seriousness of the difficulty. It takes away some of the shame.

A healthy campus is where students have the language to understand what they are experiencing, the skills to navigate everyday challenges, caring adults who notice, and easy access to professional support when they need it.

Perhaps our goal is not just to build better counselling centres, but to find the small, everyday ways in which our young people can recognize that looking after their mental health is a normal part of looking after themselves.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Shalini Sharma, director, Wellness, Plaksha University.