Alexis Redding: And the way that we can see that shift happening, and the sort of puzzle that all of us are encountering, is that we never want to under-react if a student is struggling. The risk is so high. Mm. And what’s happening is students are coming in to our offices, and we are having conversations with them, and they are using clinical language that means something different to them than it does to us. So if they tell us they’re having panic attacks or they have chronic PTSD or their cortisol is spiking, they are borrowing the language from social media that they now know, and I have to not react to the language assuming it means what I know from the DSM. And so if I were to do that, I panic, and I immediately refer them to health services. Now, I might need to make that referral, but here’s the action item. Pause first and ask a series of five questions. The first one is, “What does that term mean to you?” Mm. So we can immediately level set, and you hear instantly the difference between the, “I can’t get out of bed. I haven’t been able to take a shower. I can’t hand in my assignments.” You know that that is a student who is struggling with something clinical, and that is something for the trained, fantastic clinicians in our, in our resource center.

Heather Shea: Welcome to Student Affairs NOW, the online learning community for student affairs educators.

I’m your host, Heather Shea. Today on the podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Alexis Redding, editor of Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, along with chapter contributors, co-authors, and voices from the field, Dr. Adam Pearson-Milano, Adrian Gonzalez, and Bryan Ashton. Together, we’ll explore what the latest research tells us about supporting student mental health, the role every educator and institution plays in fostering wellbeing, and practical strategies for creating campuses where all students can thrive.

I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while. It’s incredibly timely right now as we’re about to begin the fall semester. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity, build capabilities, and empower courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of higher education.

As I mentioned, I am your host for today’s episode, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she, her, and hers, and I am broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe Three Fires comp- confederacy of Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, where I work.

Let me bring on everyone else onto the screen. Hello, everyone. I’m gonna do a very brief introduction, and then we’re gonna jump into the conversation. So first I’d like to introduce Dr. Alexis Redding. Hi, Alexis.

Alexis Redding: Hi, Heather.

Heather Shea: Dr. Redding is a developmental psychologist and faculty co-chair of the higher education at the graduate Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she teaches and researches college student development, student affairs, and higher education.

Bryan Ashton. Hi, Bryan.

Bryan Ashton: Hi. How are you?

Heather Shea: Bryan is the chief strategy and growth officer and head of Trellis Strategies, leading research consulting and policy initiatives to improve college access, affordability, student success, and financial wellness. Welcome. And Dr. Adam Pearson Milano. Welcome, Adam.

Adam Pierson Milano: Thank you, Heather.

Heather Shea: Dr. Milano is a cl- a clinical instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill of Social Work, where he leads global engagement initiatives and advances the mental health and wellbeing of service members through his work as a clinician, advisor, and consultant. And finally, Adrian Gonzalez.

Welcome, Adrian.

Adrian Gonzales: Hi, Heather

Heather Shea: Adrian is the Vice President of Student Services at San Diego Miramar College, where he champions equitable student success and wellbeing through nearly three decades of leadership across California’s community college system. I’m really excited about this panel today. And we’re gonna kick it off with Alexis.

Tell us a little bit about the book that I mentioned in the introduction. Maybe you could share a little bit about the format, why these folks are gathered here with you today, how the book came about and then we’ll jump into some additional questions.

Alexis Redding: Absolutely. So three years ago, I was tasked with creating a new professional development opportunity for student affairs practitioners and faculty members in our online professional development program at the Graduate School of Education.

And the idea behind the course was to have a different kind of conversation about supporting student mental health that broke down some of the silos that we all know exist at our institutions. And so I had this remarkable opportunity to think in a new way about what kind of conversation should we have.

And my leading idea was that I wanted to get a bunch of people into the room who cared deeply about student success and mental health, but who were not in conversation with each other otherwise. So I tapped the people at the Jed Foundation, the CEO of the National Association of College Admissions Counseling Dr.

Adam Pearson-Milano, to talk about veterans, and to break down some of the ways that we were accidentally talking past each other when we all cared about the same thing. And when we launched that first cohort of the course, I saw the impact of being able to have that kind of discussion. And so I approached the folks at Harvard Education Press with the idea to turn the course into a book.

And so that’s what we’ve spent the last couple of years doing, and really uplifting all of these different voices of folks who really want to have impact. But by doing that together and in conversation, we have already seen that it just shifts the narrative. So the idea behind the framing was that we would have 20 people coming together in conversation, sharing research and practice together, and that we would start that conversation with student voices.

So chapter one of the book was co-authored with three current college students who share really honest, candid perspectives about what it is like to navigate college and university today. And then each chapter tackles a different aspect of what it is we’re seeing framing not only new data, but new ideas about how we can help Bryan, along with his co-author, Allison Cornett of Trellis, wrote a really powerful chapter about the modern learner, how we can have a conversation about what is truly a traditional college student today, and that’s not necessarily someone who’s 18 to 21 living on a college campus.

Adam wrote a really fantastic chapter that is beautifully grounded in the research of how do we uplift who our student veterans are, resist a deficit framing, and empower every practitioner to really meet them where they are and give them what they need. And then Adrian is part of one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is that we also center vignettes that I was able to write based on interviews with five incredible practitioners, each working in a different way with students both inside and outside the system of higher education to think about how do we take these exceptional research-based ideas and translate them into practice, which we all know can sometimes be really hard.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Wow, I can’t wait to hear more about each of the chapters, and we’re gonna unpack that in some of the future questions. I wanna begin with this idea that, the book really came about, as you were saying, because of a training, and the idea that supporting student mental health is really everyone’s responsibility, not just our counseling and psychological services center.

Can you talk a little bit about the shift that you’re hoping readers make after reading this book?

Alexis Redding: Yes. The, the big shift that we are aiming for is that we want to understand that there are two things happening for students on our campuses. There are those who need clinical care, and we never want to underestimate that.

We never want to dismiss that. We wanna make sure those students are having their needs met. But at the same time, what is happening for a broader swath of our students are typical, expected challenges of what it means to be in a new phase of life in a moment of transition. And by better understanding that those two things are happening in tandem, and sometimes for a single student at the same time, we can better understand how to meet every individual student’s needs, where we don’t overreact to the student who’s telling us they’re having a bad day, and ultimately send them to mental health services when that wasn’t the intervention they needed, but we also don’t under-react so that the student who needs a clinical intervention sort of gets lost in the mix.

And so we’re just trying to humanize that conversation and to recognize what has always been hard about the process of growing up, of navigating higher ed, so that we can meet our students where they are in a way that both empowers them and empowers all of us to understand what we can actually help with.

Heather Shea: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Let’s bring the rest of you into the conversation. I think it’s really cool that each of you represent a different perspective. But I’d really love to hear what is the common thread that you think runs through the entire book when it comes to supporting student wellbeing?

And Adam, I’m gonna begin with you.

Adam Pierson Milano: Sure. I think one of the- Common Threads is the simple idea that at the heart of all the statistics and all this data and all these interventions and all this history are people. And while it’s a simple idea that these people are complicated and wonderful, and they have strengths, and they have growth edges, and that each community is different, each campus is different, each region is different, which I think can be intimidating when you first look at it.

But I think when you go through the book, what you realize is that’s actually a really important opportunity that every campus, every professional, and every student has to really improve the experience and to support each other to help with connection and to help promote success, whatever the word success means, right?

Beyond just academic success. Success in that developmental journey of your time in higher education.

Heather Shea: I love that. Thanks so much. Adrian, what about you from perspective as a practitioner?

Adrian Gonzales: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s interesting is that there is no cookie cutter approach to what we do.

A- as Adam said, our students are unique. You can deal with one student and it is not the same as the next student. It’s not the same as the next student. And so one of the things that it was interesting about the book as I was reading through it was there are multiple ideas of how to approach this issue, and it may not apply to your college.

So you might need to take something a little different, modify it for the context that you’re in and then see where it goes. And then not being afraid to test something else out because there’s a lot of approaches to this and all of our students are very unique.

Heather Shea: I love that. Bryan, your thoughts?

Bryan Ashton: Yeah, I would echo both Adam and Adrian’s points on this, and just add that from our data, but from all of the chapters and conversations, there’s an individual interconnectedness of these challenges that students are facing. And so as we think about not only how we intervene and develop, a, a suite of interventions, we have to do that by thinking about if I– even if I have a clinical intervention, I prescribe something, and a student can’t afford it, we have challenges there with the intervention.

And that holistic support for students I think is super important which then leads to I think what Alexis said at the beginning around we need to think about this as a campus-wide issue and challenge, and that there isn’t one office that’s responsible for this engagement with a student.

Rather, everybody on campus has an obligation to be informed and to have conversations around how their intervention supports student mental health.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Brian, your your co-authored chapter with Allyson Cornett really digs into this idea of financial pressures and the implications for students who are facing financial pressures.

It’s not just an economic issue it is a mental health issue. Can you talk a little bit about what you think higher ed leaders often misunderstand about the relationship between finances and student wellbeing why we hold those two things separately when they really should be intertwined?

Bryan Ashton: Yeah, it’s a, a great question, and Allyson Cornetta Trellis and I have been collecting data on student finances since two thousand and eighteen, and we’ve been fortunate to collect data from hundreds of thousands of students on issues around paying for college and thinking about individuals with some college, no credential, and finances being a leading cause of why students pause their education.

We added questions recently that look at some screener components for mental health, and so we look at anxiety and depression screeners. And we began to see in our qualitative more write-in responses that students were indicating that these is a connection here, right? That there’s stress and anxiety related to their finances, and the data has played that out.

And so we asked students a question if they would be able to come up with five hundred dollars in cash or credit to meet an emergency expense. Those that are unable to were significantly more likely, fifty-two percent versus thirty percent to screen for anxiety, thirty-seven percent versus nineteen percent to screen for depression, and sixty-three percent versus forty-eight percent to screen for loneliness.

And we see connectivity there. We see connectivity with students who are experiencing food, housing, and homelessness, and within those basic needs areas. Sixty-eight percent of students that exhibited signs of basic needs were screening positive for anxiety. Fifty-six percent of those screened positive for depression, and seventy-nine percent screened for loneliness.

And so we really were able to see in the data that these issues are connected. We don’t think that’s just a student issue. We think that, back to Adam’s point, like that’s a people issue, and people also have some of these same challenges. But as we think about how we intervene and how we think about a hierarchy of needs, financial support and stability is so key and core that if we’re able, our hope is that if we’re able to see financial interventions, that can help to support students as they, they go through their mental health journeys as well.

Heather Shea: Wow. As a parent, I cannot emphasize enough how much that resonates in watching my daughter, y- now at, going into her senior year, stress about money. And so I think that’s a really important contribution and I hadn’t necessarily put them in the same bucket before. I know on my campus, w- we have received a state grant to provide emergency fund and other types of basic needs support.

What are some of the broader institutional changes that you think could reduce financial stress for students before they reach that crisis point, and they either have to leave the institution or take a semester off or other outcomes?

Bryan Ashton: Yeah, emergency aid programs are great. We saw a lot of that impact during the pandemic with the Higher Education Emergency Relief funds.

Unfortunately, we know we will not have enough money to meet all of the need that our students have. And so we view emergency aid as a component of a holistic financial intervention because we do need that reactive support for so many students, but we know that it can’t close all of the financial gaps that our students are experiencing.

Couple things that we look at. One is thinking about unmet need that students have. It’s normally on most campuses one of the biggest predictors of whether or not a student will be retained is how much unmet need they have, which is financial aid versus that cost of attendance. We do a ton of work on predictive analytics for academics across the country.

We do very little on financial, even though we know and have a lot of data points on students to think about where there may be some upcoming challenges. Another thing is thinking about connecting students to, to public benefits. We focus on what we call the modern learner, which are learners that come in nonlinear pathways to education.

Many of our students, and depending on states, are eligible for public benefits, and we see that as a part of a holistic kind of financial strategy and our offices that are interacting with students may be some of the first screeners to notice when a student might be eligible for those support services.

We also really think about how we integrate data collection into things like counseling center intake forms. So are we asking questions about finances for the counseling center? Because not only does that help us with treatment, but it also helps us with thinking about whether a prescription or something else can be filled and can support that learner.

And so thinking about where some of those intervention points where a student is potentially having financial challenges and making sure that we’re collecting enough data to have those interventions. The last thing that I would say is we’ve done a really good job in this country, relatively, I should maybe preface that of controlling tuition and fees.

And, we haven’t seen large growth in tuition and fees, but we have seen really large increases in cost of living. And so when our students move off of campus or when they engage with the campus community, we often do not have control over those expenses, but those are where we’re seeing a lot of the stress and anxiety for students is around being able to make rent payments or afford food.

And so thinking about how we work with our ca- our broader communities beyond just the campus to not only provide services, but interventions to make life more affordable where we can, I think are really good strategies for campuses.

Heather Shea: Yeah, that’s great. I oversee a group of programs and we last year put in a pantry with just a number of different resources for students to grab and go.

And we think of it as like the convenience store. You’re not gonna get your entire grocery list here, but y- if you didn’t eat lunch and you’re on your way to class, you can stop by and grab something really quickly or hygiene products, that kind of thing. So I see all of that as kind of that network of support.

Yeah.

Bryan Ashton: And we, yeah, and we love that because time scarcity is often linked with financial challenges as well, right? Like you think about things that we do to pay for convenience to save time. If we’re not able to pay for it, time becomes a challenge. And so things like that are, meet students where they are and help to alleviate some of the time scarcity that they’re experiencing can be really good interventions that help to make their lives a little bit easier, right?

It’s not, we’re not solving the whole problem, but we’re making their lives a little bit easier on a daily basis, which is awesome to hear.

Heather Shea: That’s great. Adrian, I’d love to hear from your perspective. In your vignette that was positioned around that chapter around financial wellness, I’m curious from your perspective as a vice president at a community college, what does your role in creating a culture of care look like in practice?

Not only just, kind of the broader scope at the institutional mission statement level, but what does that mean in everyday decisions and discussions that you’re having with your team?

Adrian Gonzales: Yeah, it’s a great question. And as, as I was listening to Bryan I was thinking about all the things that we’ve done and not done on our campus.

Sure. It’s interesting ’cause over the years one of the things I’ve learned about students is that they don’t typically drop out of college because of academic ability. It’s typically life gets in the way. Whether that’s finances, transportation, housing, food. That’s really what’s preventing them from really being successful in college.

So you have to create a whole network of support that o- occurs throughout the campus. You have to train your staff to start to recognize the signals. And by staff, not just student services, not just the counselors, not just the frontline team members, but also our faculty in the classrooms.

They’re going to see signals, and do they know how to recognize those signals and make contact with the resources that are available? Are they even aware of the resources that are available, right? So there’s a whole kind of internal training that needs to occur Simultaneously, you’re developing services, and so are your services the students are asking for?

Early on, the one-on-one drop in hopefully you show up. And then over time it was like, you know what? We need to engage students. We need to figure out how to get out into the open spaces and let them know that resources are available. And now we’re transitioning to, you know what?

Maybe we need to do in group settings, right? So it’s not just we’re waiting for an appointment to occur, but we’ve created environments that they feel comfortable entering, they’re among their peers, and we’re starting to engage the supports that they need in different ways. And then the funding. You have to constantly think about the funding, right?

So as you look at your data and you’re starting to figure out where you might want to intervene, you’re looking for what’s available to you, staffing, facilities, budget, and you’re starting to shape that around, okay, let me develop this type of approach, this type of intervention. And collaborations.

I… one of the things that we’ve really been pushing on our campus is that it is not a singular office’s responsibility to deliver whatever service we’re trying to provide. There are partnerships we can create both internally and externally, and quite honestly, it creates a better turnout because if it’s one department, and we all know this, if it’s one department, you might get 10, five, 10 kids.

If it’s two department, double that. If it’s three departments, you’re gonna triple that. So if you’re gonna go to this time and effort of putting this service available, partner with your team members where there’s some synergy there and try and create multiple things happening at once so the students are engaged more deeply.

And I guess the last thing I would say is that listen to the students. Whether that’s through surveys, whether that’s through committee work, whether that’s conversations that are happening on the quad. Listen to your students because they will tell you. If you’re paying attention, they will guide you on what directions you need to go in, ’cause the population changes annually.

And then, generationally you’re gonna see different pressures coming in, so you have to figure out how you adjust for the different generations.

Heather Shea: Great points. Alex, is there a connection here with something happening in the book

Alexis Redding: that you’d like to- There is. So it was so wonderful to include Adrian’s perspective in the vignette and the work that he’s done at San Diego Miramar.

It is every time I bring him, which is a lot, into my classes as a guest speaker because I’m so inspired by the passion and care with which he treats these really complex issues, and the fact that he always does center student voices. It echoes beautifully with one of the other chapters in the book, which was written by Amanda Latz, a professor at Ball State University, and it was about the role of faculty members and the partnerships that faculty members and student affairs practitioners or student affairs educators can build with one another.

And I think that is one of the transformational pieces of doing this work, is helping faculty feel empowered as the ones who are most likely to see a pattern that something might be going wrong. Research came out in 2021, in part by the Healthy Mind study folks, that almost all faculty members were seeing these issues, and the vast majority felt completely underprepared in how they would address a conversation like this.

And so there were two key takeaways from Dr. Latz’s chapter. One was about sharing with faculty members the kind of language they can include on their syllabi to make sure that students know that they are cared about as whole human beings, and to maintain the standards and the deadlines and put some cushion around it about wellbeing first.

And so that can be really transformational. The bigger piece even is also about making the relationships across silos so the faculty member knows who to reach out to, which department or departments, so that they can make a warm handoff. And where we often see things going awry is that a faculty member has the best of intentions of, “Oh, you need to go to the tutoring center.

You need the counseling center,” and they just give a website or a link or a phone number. And what we actually need to do is make sure we are building the connection on the other side, so it’s picking up the phone, having the student pick up the phone while they are in your office or while you’re on Zoom together to make that appointment.

And what we see is the second that warm handoff is made, it changes everything.

Bryan Ashton: Yeah.

Alexis Redding: It’s also the space for us when we see a student struggling. I can pick up, here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I pick up the phone to the dean of students or one of the other student success coaches and I tell them, “Here’s a thing that I’m concerned about in broad terms.

What resources, what questions, what should I be thinking about, and do I need to escalate this?” And so it’s about building those relationships that break down the silos that empowers everybody, especially the faculty who are on the frontline, and we need to stop seeing this as an either/or. Faculty and student affairs educators are in this together, and the more we do that, the more we serve our students

Heather Shea: Yeah.

As, as somebody who has a adjunct faculty appointment, I teach a education abroad program and I’m thinking about some of my colleagues that I work with in my department and, their disciplinary training isn’t necessarily in the same things that I- … studied as a doctoral student.

So it’s no wonder they feel a little bit ill-equipped, and that’s where I think the training that you spoke about in the beginning and just even access to this text, I think, will be a tremendous resource and support as faculty are trying to also gain some skills. But as you mentioned, it’s not always just handing off or giving a website or here’s an email as well.

That’s fantastic. Adam, let’s bring in your chapter here in talking a little bit about student veteran, student veterans. I know from my past experiences working really closely alongside our campus center for military connected students that there are so many strengths that veterans bring to campus.

But they also navigate transitions that some ed- many educators, didn’t have that same pathway, so they don’t always fully understand. What do you wish folks who either work in student affairs or faculty or others knew about supporting veteran students, and particularly related to mental health?

Adam Pierson Milano: Thank you. I think that’s a really important question, and I think you partially answered it in the framing- … which is that student veterans, generally speaking, do bring strengths to the campus. And I think all too often, not only in practice but also in literature, we almost define this relatively large and incredibly diverse group of people only by the difficulty of the transition, right?

So we say these experiences must be so different,” and that’s where our story stops. But as you say, there’s these incredible strengths and as has become a real through line of our conversation today, these are whole people coming to the campus who also have veteran or military-affiliated students as part of this much larger multifaceted identity.

And this veteran identity might exist as very central for some students, but for other students it might exist a little further from, if we wanna call it, the core of their identity, right? And as they come onto a new campus and they adopt this new student identity, they also might watch that veteran identity shift closer to their core or further to their core as they make new friends.

We might watch that actually shift a little bit. And so if there’s one thing I would wanna hang onto, it’s this through line of it’s this whole person. And I think when we use conversations about educating military-affiliated students, there’s this phrase of the veteran-friendly campus, and I’d like to move away from a veteran-friendly campus to this other word that’s become a, a through line of today, which is empowering-

Right? And flourishing. And I think part of that goes to this idea of the community that they’re stepping into. No, no matter why a student veteran, a military-affiliated student got involved with the military and served, there is service inherent in that experience, regardless of how they feel or what they experienced when they’re in the military.

That service to your community does not have to end when you take off the uniform. And guess what? You’re entering this new campus community, and I can almost guarantee that as the student veteran enters a campus community, there are veterans on the faculty, there are veterans in the staff, there are veterans their peers.

As we talk about this idea of a warm handoff wouldn’t it be great if we found a way always to connect our student veterans to those veteran faculty, those veteran staff, those veteran peers, while also not limiting them just to that group? And I could go on all day on this tether, but I’ll probably end it there for this afternoon.

Heather Shea: Lots of resources. In fact, we’ve done a couple of episodes around serving veterans and military-affiliated students, so I’ll link those in our show notes as well. And I also think, and this is what I also love about the book is, veterans is one student identity, but there are many others in which we do really need to build kind of understanding of how each individual student is unique and build those kind of competencies so that we are better at supporting their unique journeys.

I wanna move to this maybe a bit of a paradigm shift as I’m thinking a little bit about it, and I think there’s been a lot of recent talk about how we build student-ready campuses. But, I think about higher education is, all about helping individual students become more resilient, but this book really, I think, addresses how we make sure we’re addressing the institutional policies, practices, environments, training programs, et- etc. That might be contributing factors to either success or distress, right? And so Alexis, maybe you can talk a little bit about how this book kind of picks up that theme and, what do we need to do to address student distress to begin with so that we don’t have to necessarily have additional resources and systems in place?

Alexis Redding: So the answer to this question comes from what Adrian said, which was listen to our students. And one of the things that I do when training my student affairs educators for their first role out of graduate school is we talk a lot about the friction points that students find themselves up against as they are trying to navigate higher education.

And there are two things. One, the silos that we’ve already talked about. So they are having a singular experience. They are having a struggle with one problem, but the solution lives in four different offices. And so we really have to think about how we are creating an ecosystem to meet them and those challenges.

And if it needs to live in four different offices because that’s the structure, those four offices need to be under an umbrella together. Those people need to be in conversations with each other so that student doesn’t have to start from scratch each time. The student will tell you where those friction points are if you listen.

But even in addition to that, there’s a thing that we can do, and it’s another thing we do in class that I find so helpful because it doesn’t take a lot of time, doesn’t take any money whatsoever, and it tells us where some of these friction points are instantly. It’s that we need to go to our campus website and have a list of 20 common problems or struggles students might be having.

And then what I have students in my class do is test out how many clicks does it take you to get to the answer? Is there a broken link in that answer? Are you getting conflicting data? And we need to figure that out so that when they are having an issue, they get to the right place very quickly. It’s not seven clicks and embedded on a third website, or they have to have a password to a certain thing.

If they need to know about childcare or parking or how to take a leave of absence or how to get emergency aid because they are struggling, that should be a one-click answer. And we can figure out where those friction points are for ourselves, even if they don’t know to tell us

Heather Shea: That’s, that is a fantastic way to think a little bit about it, and I think it could be physical as well, not just- on the web, right? I know a lot of students go there and, Google is their favorite thing to find whatever campus resource they’re looking for. But on our campus at least, we started centralizing some of those resources around kind of that ecological validation model. So I love that- I love the model of an ecology, right? Because it’s really- … talking systemically. But a one-stop, right? A one-stop where you can easily get a whole bunch of different needs met, and those can be transactional needs, but they can also be more student transformational needs, like counseling or career services or even just a success coach.

Alexis Redding: We can also add those things on our syllabi. Yeah. So the final couple of pages of every course syllabus that I put online has how do you get basic need security links to resources, the counseling center. Not only does that put the information front and center for the student, but it signals that is part of my contract with them, that I care about them beyond just the grade in my class or their performance in my class.

And that’s something, again, that can be easily standardized across syllabi. The more times they see that information, the more it is socialized to them, the more it does not feel that they’re doing something wrong. That’s just typical and expected about the college experience. By demystifying getting help in that way, making help-seeking just normal, it’s how we do college, that changes what happens for all of our students.

And I love that you named Rendon and the Model of Ecological Validation, which of course I teach in my class. And- Yeah … it is, it’s a beautiful way to think about how are we meeting our students where they are? How do they feel in those interactions? And how are we resisting our deficit framing in the process?

Heather Shea: Yeah. I love that. I have a kind of a, a two-parter question that I’m gonna ask of each of you, because I do think there are some really practical takeaways from this book and from each of your perspectives. So if a campus team were only able to implement one idea from your chapter or from your book or from your perspective as we’re heading into this fall semester, we’re recording this on August 6th, for those who are listening later, what would you encourage them to prioritize and why?

And then coupled with that, what gives you hope about the future of student mental health? So a little bit of a two-parter there. Adam, do you mind if we start with you on this?

Adam Pierson Milano: Sure. And I heard you loud and clear say one. I’m gonna cheat and give you two- That’s fine. That’s fine … which is one for the campus, which I’m gonna just refer to as the non-clinical space, which as we’ve discussed today is just as important to mental health, and then one for our clinical space, maybe the counseling center.

So for the campus, for the non-clinical space, for student veterans, very often their first call to a campus is gonna be their veteran, their VA certifying official, making sure their GI Bill benefits are gonna work out, and maybe that’s a one-stop shop for the veteran’s center or maybe it’s a separate office within student affairs.

I say let’s look at that as a fantastic opportunity to begin this implicit narrative that not only do your benefits work or not work, it’s not this green light, red light call, but it’s also the opportunity to start the narrative of belonging, of fit- … and of what the community actually looks like on this campus.

And it’s really that idea I learned this while working in student affairs at Harvard, of no wrong door, that if I’m a veteran certifying official, that is my opportunity to begin the narrative of belonging. Similar to what this narrative of belonging is, th- I’ll go to this idea of the clinical space.

If we’re calling ourselves a veteran-friendly campus or, as I’m urging, a veteran-empowering campus- If we as a campus counseling center are not equipped to work with combat trauma, complex PTSD, if we’re not equipped to use the language that may come along with some of the mental health concerns that might come out of the military first and foremost, it’d be great if we could be equipped.

I know that might not be realistic for all campuses. So if it’s not realistic and we’re not equipped, how can we nail that first interaction in a way that we refer without further stigmatizing- … this idea that our campus cannot handle this, right? Cannot make these assumptions. And so how are we equipping our clinic there?

And then you asked the tag-on question of what gives you hope. And I’ll say this, it actually comes from my active duty time. And I remember when I started active duty, the big thing that we had to– I was an embedded behavioral health officer in the Army and the big thing I had to fight was the stigma of mental health.

And so all, every time I went to a new unit, I would give all these talks about mental health is the same as physical health, and then this and that. And by the time I was ending my time in active duty and transitioning out, people were lining up. They were like, “Mental health is important. Can we, can everybody go in?”

“Can we get more providers?” And so what gives me hope is that this conversation of mental health while stigma certainly does exist, and I think that’s still a worthy effort for us to continue to advocate with, I think we’re headed in the right direction there. And I think the more we talk about mental health, and the more that language permeates, whether it’s a clinical space or our syllabi or our student affairs, I think the more opportunities we have to get on the proactive side to increase things like belonging connection with oneself, let alone connection with others, so that we don’t put this massive load only on the clinic on the reactive side.

Heather Shea: Yeah, beautifully said. Thank you. Adrian, your thoughts. If you could say do this one thing, and then what is your, one of your hopes for the future?

Adrian Gonzales: It’s interesting, every time I listen to my colleagues it triggers so many things I wanna go do. Yeah. So I appreciate how you inspire everyone, every one of you in the room.

I think- I wanna riff off a little bit of what Adam said. I think the making things visible and engageable, I think, is a thing I would advise people to really think about. Quit keeping things in silos. Quit keeping things behind doors, but bring them out into the open. Allow people to easily step into them maybe not even realizing that there are other components happening as they step into that environment.

And an example I’ll give you last spring I came across one of the flyers of the many things that we’ve been doing on campus, and it was the EOPS program, which usually works with low-income students the veterans program hosting a study jam. And as part of it, they brought in the mental health center to talk about stress reduction and anxiety reduction during finals.

And they had the tutoring center engaged to dr- to do some drop-in tutoring. It was like a three-hour block that they did. And I was so pleased to see that because we’ve been really trying to push that on our campuses to collaborate.

Adam Pierson Milano: Yeah.

Adrian Gonzales: So now we had four departments collaborating, and then I found out that they provided food as well, right?

So I’m gonna pull you in with tutoring. I’m gonna pull you in with food. I’m gonna pull you in if you’re feeling stressed. And then I’m gonna support you to get ready for a pretty stressful time getting ready for finals, right? And it wasn’t hard to do, and it didn’t cost a lot of money. But it took people to make phone calls to each other, coordinate with each other, and get out of their spaces into a common space.

And so that’s what is really encouraging, I think, for me, is that we’re doing more and more of that, not only on our campus but also externally to our campus. Talking with other campuses about, “Hey, what are you doing? How is it working? What’s beneficial? What’s not beneficial? How much does it cost?”

We’re reaching out to our community partners more effectively, I think, and we’re seeing more community resources showing up on college campuses. So I think really just bringing these things out into the open and normalizing them, right? Every one of us, and including all of us in the room, at some point during our college career, we were hungry, right?

And we were trying to figure out, “Okay, can I go get that slice of pizza with the five bucks I have in my pocket?” Or, “What do I do with that five bucks?” Now we have food pantries, right? I don’t remember seeing a food pantry on my college campus when I was growing up. So the reality is that we have now put that more front and center.

We’re trying to normalize these things, and I think I would really encourage us to continue moving that direction.

Heather Shea: I love that. I also think a lot about the way that when we collaborate, sometimes students find out about something that they wouldn’t have never known existed, right? Yeah. And so some of that is the secret decoder ring, of campus speak, that whether it’s the acronym or whether it’s like, oh, they work together. That al- also might be a resource for me. So I love that. That’s fantastic. Brian, how about you?

Bryan Ashton: Yeah, I think one, one action and, we talked about student-ready campuses and some of those pieces is viewing our students as what we call modern learners.

And so there’s two parts to this. One is that, and I mentioned this earlier, that students increasingly consume education and training in a nonlinear way. But the second one is they come to us with personas other than student that are often their primary. And so they might be workers who go to school instead of students who work, they might be caregivers.

And we’re even seeing that in our traditional eighteen-year-old population, right? Working thirty, thirty-five hours, forty hours a week while they’re going to school. That requires a mindset shift from what used to be, we fit our life into education to education fits into our life and around our life.

And so as we think about what we’re hearing from our students and how we’re intervening with students, that holistic approach to we’re not just treating the student, we’re treating the whole person, and we need to make sure that our processes reflect that and that our service reflects that in terms of how we engage, I think is super important.

I have a lot of hope for the future. We see a lot of polls out there that, higher education maybe doesn’t have the best public perception and maybe lower than Congress, depending on the day in terms of how people view it. We ask students that are currently enrolled two questions. We say, “Do we think that or do you think that this is a good investment in your financial future?”

And seventy-five percent of students say that they do think it, it is a good investment in their financial future. And there’s a lot to unpack there, right? Around how students are thinking about return on investment of their degree or credential. But probably more importantly, eighty-four percent say that they think that a degree or credential is going to lead to a higher quality of life.

And I think we often, with economic conversations, trust conversations we lose sight of, especially for those that are currently enrolled in higher education they do believe by and large that this will lead to a higher quality of life and that there’s a holistic return on this that is worth it.

And it’s our job to be able to continue to support them to make sure that they’re able to earn that degree or credential. But that real hope in the future and the value of post-secondary education and the time and energy that our students are giving us gives us a lot of hope.

Gives me a lot of hope, I should say for the future.

Heather Shea: That’s fantastic. I love it. I love the data too. That’s great. All right. Finally, Alexis, if you were talking to a campus team, they had one, thing that they could implement and then what do you think gives you hope about the future of student mental health in higher ed?

Alexis Redding: Sure. So I’m gonna flip the question and start with what is giving me hope in this moment and why I have hope for the future, and the answer, of course, is the students. It is incredible to watch the ways in which they are showing up and telling their truths and asking for help, and the ways in which the stigma around mental health, as Adam was naming, are really starting to shift in a way that is powerful and important and that honestly keeps me going on the really hard days when we’re talking about the very painful parts of doing this work.

Indeed, I … The cover of our book, which is a varsity sweatshirt where we have replaced a school name with mental health in college, really speaks to that idea that we want the conversation about mental health to be front and center in the ways that we talk about college. So that makes me very hopeful, and then opens the door to the one action that we need to take, and this is for anybody on campus, which is when a student names for us that they are struggling, we need to meet that moment without instantly panicking.

And the way that we can see that shift happening, and the sort of puzzle that all of us are encountering, is that we never want to under-react if a student is struggling. The risk is so high. And what’s happening is students are coming in to our offices, and we are having conversations with them, and they are using clinical language that means something different to them than it does to us.

So if they tell us they’re having panic attacks or they have chronic PTSD or their cortisol is spiking, they are borrowing the language from social media that they now know, and I have to not react to the language assuming it means what I know from the DSM. And so if I were to do that, I panic, and I immediately refer them to health services.

Now, I might need to make that referral, but here’s the action item. Pause first and ask a series of five questions. The first one is, “What does that term mean to you?” So we can immediately level set, and you hear instantly the difference between the, “I can’t get out of bed. I haven’t been able to take a shower.

I can’t hand in my assignments.” You know that is a student who is struggling with something clinical, and that is something for the trained, fantastic clinicians in our resource center. But the student who says “It– There’s so much work, and I’m not quite sure how to navigate the readings, and my roommate’s really annoying me, and I’ve never been away from home, and I miss my friends,” that’s a different kind of conversation.

So the first question is, “What does that mean to you?” And then, “How is that showing up? How long has that been going on? What supports do you already have?” And either, “How can I help?” or, “What do you need?” At the end of that conversation, it still might be a referral, and if there’s any gray area, again, the stakes are too high.

So we’ll make that referral. We’ll pick up the phone to our colleague who can help us. But if we take that five minutes to have that conversation, we are meeting that student, and we are not making a moment that is hard for them worse. And what I see that we are doing inadvertently because we care so much and because we know what the stakes are is we are automatically making that referral when they might need tutoring or time management or some other structure in place, which signals to them something is wrong, and they might not actually go for clinical counseling, so I have shut down the one line of communication that they had.

And so it’s the easy shift that I hope that we can all make, is recognizing if the student is showing up and telling you whatever the words they’re using. It doesn’t– We don’t have to push back that social media is doing a bad jo- We set that aside. The words they’re using are simply telling us, “I’m struggling.”

And so show up in that conversation and figure out what do they need, and how do I help connect them to that resource and then have the warm handoff to make sure they get it?

Heather Shea: I love that. Yeah a- again, as a parent listening to all of the things that you just said, I think that’s also a really great lesson for parents.

If they get a phone call from their student and their student is expressing, concerns or struggles, again, what does this mean to you? And if, like, how is this showing up? What, how long has this lasted? I think those are fantastic questions to, for parents sometimes to ask. And then what are the help-seeking behaviors that we can start in- instilling from day one?

This has been just a fabulous conversation. We always like to end on, a riff off of a similar question. And as this podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. Our version of this for today is, what is one thing you know now about supporting college student mental health that you wish you had known earlier in your career?

And then if you would like to share how people can get in touch with you, whether that’s email or LinkedIn you can share that as well. And Adam, we’re gonna start with you again.

Adam Pierson Milano: Sure. Yeah, sounds good. I’ve, I started my career as a residence director.

And so I, I didn’t have my mental health license at that point, and I didn’t have a ton of, wisdom at that point besides ones that I stole from mentors.

But I was the person in the dorm on the front line getting that midnight call, often getting there before our public safety or the police were there for these crisis calls. I then went from there to, to be a clinician in the military, came out, did student affairs, and I’m on the faculty side. I say that to say I’ve held these kind of different roles.

And for example, even though I’m a clinician still, I’m not a clinician on my campus, right? I’m a faculty member on my campus. And what I think that really speaks to is that there is a team there to support. And so it really comes to the idea of, never worry alone. So if a student’s coming to me to chat I wanna listen, and I wanna listen to their experience, not to project my own on it or to respond with how that relates to m- me, right?

I wanna listen to their experience. I wanna listen not to solve, but also to give an action to connect to somebody else on the team, right? So that I can just remember they can connect to that campus director that I was six years ago, right? As a faculty member, I can connect them to that clinical person who’s gonna be equipped to handle that if it is something that requires clinical needs.

So I think mine would be never worry alone.

Heather Shea: Awesome. Thank you so much. Adrian, how about you? What do you wish- Yeah, that’s true … you would have known earlier in your career?

Adrian Gonzales: Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause it’s been 30 years. So as I think back to the young Adrian, what he was doing-

…

Adrian Gonzales: I think I’ve always been good at engaging students.

I’ve always really loved to engage students. That’s why we’re here. And I’ve always liked to have fun with what we were doing. And I think what I wish I had known when I was younger was that there are other people on campus like that, right? I started as a TRIO director, and so I was so focused on getting TRIO up and running and ensuring that we were supported and all that other stuff, that I forgot about the fact that there was another program just like TRIO sitting over there in another office, and I could have partnered with them, right?

And that there are faculty members that wanted to support the TRIO students in the ways that they could because they had to teach, right? So they couldn’t do it as much as we were doing it as TRIO staff members. But they wanted to have fun, too, right? And so how do we engage them to have fun with us?

So I think I wish what I had, would have learned earlier is you’re not there alone. There are partners all over this campus. There are people that want to engage the students. And if you can create those connections, your program is the better for it, and your institution is the better for it. Learning to have that institutional perspective as opposed to that programmatic perspective is so critical in doing this work.

And so I think, trying to really start to take a step out of your own role and looking at it more holistically I wish I had learned that earlier in my career.

Heather Shea: Thank you so much. Bryan, how about you?

Bryan Ashton: Yeah, I’d, I would build off of Adrian’s there. I- so I started my career in student affairs at a very large public bureaucracy that functioned as an academic institution as well.

And I think, assuming positive intent across the campus that we’re all working towards the same end goal would… is super helpful. We- and we’re not, we’re a product of the structure that we have in terms of silos on a campus, and I think most on the staff and faculty side are as frustrated as the students sometimes with those silos.

And thinking about how we can proactively, there were so many great examples today, of how to proactively bring together interventions and conversations and making sure that there’s time and space for, for that to occur, I think is something that I wish I would’ve known and not been as intimidated by the structure, as, as much as looking at it as a people problem, and that the people wanna do what’s right, and so we’ve, the more we can engage and assume positive intent across campuses the better we can serve students.

Heather Shea: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And finally, Alexis, what would you wish you would’ve known earlier in your career?

Alexis Redding: I think I suspected earlier in my career, and then earlier in the process of bringing this book to life, that if we could all get in one room together, literally or proverbially, and to have conversations across all of the ways that we think about students, so the clinical practitioners, the developmental psych people, the student affairs educators, that we could figure out a better way to meet the moment.

And what I have seen over the past 100-plus days since the book came out, and doing book clubs at colleges and universities, and consulting at different schools, is how much we have in common around our hope for students, our frustration about how do we do it? But when we have these conversations across the silos, it is transformational, and those transformations can sometimes be very small.

And indeed, in the work that I do when I’m not focused on student mental health, I do archival research on student experiences across generations, so following students from the 1940s and also interviewing people 50 years after they graduated about what mattered. Wow. What we have seen in doing that work is that a single 15-minute conversation has the possibility and potential of transforming a student’s life, which means every single one of us who shows up every day and meets with students has that option, has that chance to show up and really see them, and to be there in that moment.

But it also means we have that for each other as we’re navigating this work and showing up for our students as well. And so I think these are things that I always hoped were true, and now I have seen in the process of launching this book that they really are, that we can change the conversation together, and that gives me, to go back to hope, a tremendous amount of hope for our students and for our institutions.

Heather Shea: Wow, really well said. We are gonna end it on that. Thank you to all of you for being here today, for sharing your wisdom and your experiences, and also your contributions to this text. I am excited. I noted because I listen to audiobooks, the audiobook version is coming out in September also a great way to consume and engage with the text.

But we will also put a link to where you can pick up your copy as well in the show notes. So thanks again to our sponsor of today’s episode, Evolve. Given the current context of higher education, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and capabilities to transform their institutions and the future of higher education.

The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys tailored to four different leadership levels. Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short asynchronous video modules. They also offer Evolve for Leadership Teams, and if you are ready to evolve your leadership voice, visit evolve-institute.com to learn more.

A huge thank you as always to our producer, Nat Ambrosey. She makes us look and sound great. We are so grateful for you. And if you are listening to this episode and you’ve never heard of Student Affairs NOW before, this is the first time, please do subscribe, whether it’s through any channel that you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

We also have a weekly newsletter which announces each episode and provides related episode links. And if you’re so inclined, you can leave us a five-star review. We’ve gotten a couple of those, and it just makes our hearts warm as well. So again, I’m Heather Shea. Thanks for watching and listening.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of one another, and let’s make it a great week. Thanks, everybody

https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570753/mental-health-in-college