…
Enlisting faculty and staff to prevent suicide
Melody Moezzi is an Iranian-American writer, professor and mental health activist with three books under her belt, including Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life, and The Rumi Prescription. But in graduate school, she had a severe encounter with mental illness that almost stilled her voice forever.
In Moezzi’s last semester of graduate school at Emory University, she was severely stressed. She’d been diagnosed with major depressive disorder – a diagnosis that turned out to be wrong – and was given antidepressants as she worked to complete degrees in law and public health. Then an administrator suggested she might not graduate according to her desired timeline, and she decided, as she put it, “to check out.” Fortunately, she survived.
“Looking back on it, I think, what a stupid reason to kill yourself,” she told MindSite News. “I have a wonderful husband, I have a wonderful life. Things were not objectively going wrong.”
Now an author, attorney and visiting professor of creative writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington, Moezzi tells her students to ask for help if they are in crisis, something she was too proud to do. She also advocates giving faculty and staff better tools to recognize a student in distress.
In an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, Moezzi wrote that evidence-based suicide prevention training like QPR – question, persuade, refer – should be mandatory for university staff.
The technique is meant to help a professor or staff member recognize the signs of a student in crisis and ask critical questions at a moment when it may be lifesaving. She uses the technique frequently, and has offered to take students to the emergency room or the university counseling center. She ended up driving one student to the emergency room after they answered “yes” to the question, “Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”
Yet suicide prevention programs like QPR are not mandatory at Moezzi’s university – nor at many others. Active shooter drills are mandatory – a fact she finds ironic, since mass shootings account for 1% of gun casualties and suicides for 60%. In Inside Higher Ed, Moezzi concludes: “Failing to mandate suicide prevention training at colleges and universities in spite of these statistics isn’t just misguided or negligent. It’s ignorant and reckless.”
Nine hundred miles from Moezzi’s school, a team of psychologists at Loyola University in Chicago are piloting another approach. The goal: to reach students before they get to a crisis point by enlisting academic advisors to connect with students about their state of mind.
Colleen Conley and her team at Loyola designed a short “motivational interviewing” curriculum that advisors can use during a routine meeting. Advisors help students reflect on their goals and ask if they might benefit from any changes: Are they getting enough sleep or drinking too much? Is it affecting their mental health? How might the student make a change?
Early results show a promising trend, Conley said. Students interviewed in this way are more likely to seek counseling services, and motivational interviewing is linked to behavior change. Plus, she said, it gets students to discuss mental health at an appointment they’re already attending.
“We found that if we could work even five to ten minutes of talking about well-being into a meeting that was already happening, that was so much easier than relying on students to schedule a separate appointment,” Conley said.
In Winston-Salem North Carolina, Wake Forest University uses an app called Timely Care to provide 24/7 access to a mental health professional for students in crisis. The app also makes it easy for students to schedule non-urgent counseling appointments and provides coaching on diet, nutrition, exercise and sleep.
As colleges work to support student mental health, there’s still a lack of evidence on what works best, said Boston University’s Lipson, partly because each campus is different.
“While a public health approach is the starting point for addressing mental health at colleges and universities, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said. “What works for one campus may not work for another.”
One approach that seems both popular and effective, however, is peer support.
…
Read the full piece here:
https://mindsitenews.org/2022/04/27/young-advocates-take-the-lead-to-curb-campus-suicide
This article also appeared in The 74:
https://www.the74million.org/article/young-advocates-take-the-lead-to-curb-campus-suicide