Episode 18: The Perfect Storm: College Students, Mental Health, and the Sense of Belonging on Campus

The end of the spring semester marks the release of another episode! This month, we tackled the tough topic of mental health among college students. We talked about how COVID-19 has impacted college students seeking mental health services, the challenges for counselors and administrators working in university mental health centers, policy solutions to the crisis, and other things that have happened as a result of the pandemic like changes in technology.

We spoke to Maithreyi Gopalan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy and Social Science Research Institute co-funded faculty member at Penn State, and Brett Scofield, Ph.D., Associate Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Penn State and Executive Director of Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) about mental health, college students, what universities are doing (and should be doing), and a little bit of everything in between.

Episode Resources and References

• There's been a series of articles in the New York Times about adolescent mental health that are worth perusing: Teens In Distress Are Swamping Pediatricians, ‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens, Hundreds of Suicidal Teens Sleep in Emergency Rooms. Every Night., and Surgeon General Warns of Youth Mental Health Crisis.
• Maithreyi mentions a study that she did with her colleagues, Stephanie Lanza, Ph.D. and Ashley-Linden Carmichael, Ph.D., from the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Center, about overall college experiences, the student community, and their sense of belonging and impact that may have on their well being, health, and academic performance.
• Brett discusses the Clinical Load Index (CLI), a metric used to measure the average annual caseload of a clinician at a mental health center.
• Maithreyi mentions the dozens of calls for grant applications opened up by the National Institute of Mental Health about understanding the effect of the pandemic on mental health.
• Brett discusses two researchers involved with projects at CCMH: Louis Castonguay, Ph.D. and Jeffrey Hayes, Ph.D.

The transcript for the episode is available here.