Help Your Student Access Mental Health Support by Cambria Pilger
Mental health is a growing conversation topic on college campuses all across the country. It’s important to know how to talk about mental health with your student and how to help them find resources. The best thing you can do as a parent is to support and love your student, and encourage them to engage in wellness programs and opportunities on and off campus. Beyond your support, there are many student leaders, staff members and friends already looking out for your student! Every university has at least one group or program focused on student wellbeing and mental health. At my school, the main mental health resources come from the counseling center, residence life and our Student Success Center. Each of these offer a variety of opportunities to learn and talk about one’s mental health. The counseling center hosts lectures and workshops and offers all students 10 free counseling sessions per semester (services on your student’s campus may differ). It also recently implemented a “Let’s Talk” series, which allows students to have a 15-minute walk-in session with a counselor, any weekday at a given location on
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campus. These sessions are helpful because the counseling center often has a waitlist for scheduled appointments, and these brief sessions give students just enough time to process what’s going on in their world and get support from a trained professional. This sort of brief, informal meeting could be a great way for you to support your student, too. Set up your own “Let’s Talk” call with your student. It can be a few times each week that you’ll be available and willing to talk, should your student need it. Residence life does a lot to create open spaces to discuss and learn about mental health. When I was a Resident Assistant, my fellow RAs and I led many “Prime Times” (two-hour weeknight events in the dorm) about mental health. Once we focused on anxiety — what it is, what it feels like, how it manifests itself — and other times we looked at how different aspects of a student’s life (social/emotional/ academic/vocational/financial) impact their mental health. I also held
