Carleton and the Carleton Undergraduate Students’ Association have announced separate brand new mental health initiatives this fall, featuring two new mental health weeks, called “Thrive Week” and “Pop the Stigma,” both of which aim to reduce stigma and promote “awareness.” This is great, sure, but we’ve already had plenty of “awareness” initiatives, and I’m not sure they’ve made us any more aware.
Our university is already home to an award-winning mental health policy, plus a wide variety of services on campus, including counselling and psychiatric assessment, an emergency response team and the Good2Talk phone service, a 24/7 distress line.
These services are hugely important–but whether or not they exist is only half the battle. Gathering the courage to actually use them is a massive hurdle, and that merits more of our attention.
What we lack right now is a practical awareness. We need specificity. If you’ve never experienced a mental health crisis, you may not know what I mean. Many mental illnesses go hand in hand with huge feelings of fear, uncertainty, guilt and low self-worth, as well as decreased ability to prioritize. These make it hard enough to reach out to family and friends when we’re having trouble; reaching out to a stranger can be exponentially tougher.
These are situations with no convenient social script; there is no “normal” way to tell someone you want to kill yourself, no easy way to explain that you are too depressed to go out, no polite way to duck out of the room when you’re having a panic attack. Cold-calling a crisis line is a terrifying exercise—you have no idea what to expect from the other end of the phone.
You might feel as though this crisis, while probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, is hardly the worst thing happening right now—and this kind of self-defeating logic stops people from getting the help they deserve every day. Feeling like you can’t possibly be suffering enough to take up the time of a professional is common.
Another hurdle is not knowing whether “getting help” is going to cost you money. For students navigating health services for the first time, it’s not always easy to tell what will and won’t be covered by insurance. While you might understand that visiting a doctor on campus is covered, any specialists or medication prescribed to you afterward might not be.
You might also be uncomfortable with the medication itself. The stigma surrounding anti-depressants and other psychiatric drugs—which are, let’s remember, often life-saving—is still strong. Rather than treating psychiatric meds as somehow less valid than other medical treatments, we could all benefit from understanding that mental illnesses are medical conditions as real as asthma or diabetes, and that the drugs that treat them are as important as inhalers and insulin.
The last frontier in campus mental health isn’t more service—it’s making those services less stigmatized and less scary. A student in crisis should be able to easily find who to talk to and what to expect when getting help. They should feel confident in their right to choose their treatments and get them covered.
Students should know that when somebody reaches out for help, your job can be as easy as showing up for moral support while your friend makes a scary phone call or sits in a daunting waiting room. You have the power to be reassuring instead of judgmental when friends confide in you, and this is a huge deal: all the crisis lines in the world won’t help students if they’re too afraid to call.
This kind of practical awareness has the power to improve—and save—the lives of students in crisis, and I’m hoping it’s exactly what Carleton will deliver this time.
