Most college students feel stress at least some point during their time at university. Whether this stress comes from our academics, social lives or families, stress consumes the typical student on a regular basis. For this reason, a deliberation on mental health was extremely applicable to the Penn State community. I, along with dozens of other RCL students, attended a deliberation in late February titled, “A Better PennState of Mind.”

The deliberation started with a quick overview on why the deliberation was applicable. I learned that anxiety, depression, stress, family and school are the top 5 mental health concerns of college-aged adults. While Penn State does have programs already in place to help students deal with these personal issues, the programs could be improved and better advertised. For instance, there were mentions of the Cedar clinic that provides free, unlimited mental health counseling sessions for students. I had no idea. Often, students must wait for weeks to schedule an appointment with the well-known PSU CAPs program. The Cedar clinic wait time is about 1 week.

The deliberation was broken into three main approaches. One group looked at the potential benefits of requiring each student to take a mental health awareness course, similar to the alcohol training done in New Student Orientation. Another group analyzed the accessibility of on-campus resources for mental health. I found it interesting how they mentioned that a successful college mental health program usually has 1 counselor for every 1,000 students. I wonder if Penn State has 50 trained counselors to deal with the almost 50,000 students on campus?!? Lastly, the third group touched on the potential values of courses that teach students how to manage their own health. Ultimately, we concluded that the school already provides a stress management course—however, as one student put, “The stress management course is really hard and causes my friend a lot of stress.”

I think the groups did a solid job of explaining their ideas and solutions. However, many of the approaches seemed to overlap—this led me to conclude that all approaches could be implemented at Penn State. In addition, the approaches could have been better tied to core values.

Despite these minor flaws, I found the conversations and input of students really eye-opening. People talked about their own experiences with University counseling and about their personal strategies for dealing with stress. We looked at if RA’s could become better mental health resources and if there should be offices in each residential hall to provide counselors and mental health management strategies.

I think this deliberation was extremely valuable because it brought together so many students and allowed us to connect to one another about our personal experiences. Unlike other deliberation that might focus on topics that don’t relate to college students as well, this topic was extremely applicable. Input from audience members was constant and fluid. Everyone could contribute in a meaningful way because mental health affects everyone. I think it is important to remember that successful deliberations have a topic and audience that are compatible.