Our deliberation focuses on improving the mental health atmosphere here at Penn State, and the approach I am focusing on is an improvement in mental health education across the board. There’s no question that students at all ages have been, and are still struggling with many mental-health related issues on a daily basis – especially including college students. In recent years, this issue has definitely been brought to a new light in various different ways, and different solutions have been proposed. The first article I read, “Schools Turn a Corner on Mental-Health Education“, recognizes that, “one out of every four or five young people under the age of 18 experiences a mental-health disorder—such as anxiety or severe depression—each year” (Melnyk). While they recognize this issue and some of the help programs that have been put in place to combat the issue, the article goes on to say that schools shouldn’t just provide special assistance for students struggling with mental health problems, but also offer mental health education to students as well. This article is relevant to our education-based approach as it provides an example of an organization that is attempting to implement such mental health education programs in schools of varying ages. The article discusses how the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed an analytical tool in order to compare the mental health programs of different schools in an attempt to measure the impact of these education efforts, making sure they are at par with the CDC’s characteristics of an effective health curriculum. (Melnyk). I believe it would be beneficial for Penn State and other campuses to have a similar guideline.
The second article I found is titled “What a successful university mental health program looks like“, and relates to the first article as it describes an effective mental health program; however, this article focuses more on mental health programs at the university level. The article recognizes the faults of mental health services at universities – long waits, limited availability, money, and more. But it goes on to give an example of a program at the University of West Georgia that is a little different that the typical help service in that it focuses more on prevention. The program is done through collaboration with the counseling center and student peer mentors, creating a peer-to-peer outreach system. (Alters) I think that this could be an idea of how to educate students through each other, and something that could definitely be an example of how our approach could be carried out.
Works Cited
Alters, Kimberly. “What a Successful University Mental Health Program Looks Like.” The Week , The Week, 15 Oct. 2015, theweek.com/articles/580547/what-successful-university-mental-health-program-looks-like.
Melnyk, Bernadette Mazurek. “Schools Turn a Corner on Mental-Health Education.” Education Week, Editorial Projects in Education, 10 Mar. 2017, www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/24/schools-turn-a-corner-on-mental-health-education.html.