Carleton’s Thrive Week aims to build positive mental health among Carleton students and staff. Events such as workshops on mental health support training, and healthy activity, were held from Nov. 16-20.
Thrive Week is a great initiative in which resources such as counselling services can be brought to the attention of the Carleton community. However, a mental health week in mid-November is too late for students to build a “thriving” framework.
With the heavy amount of schoolwork combined with other stress-causing factors, students lacking effective coping skills could be in a mental health crisis by November. For many students, thriving is their last concern and surviving is what matters.
Stress levels tend to be lower at the start of a semester and rise during midterm and exam seasons in the later months. McGill University’s counselling services director told the McGill Reporter in 2013 that at least 20 students per day, on top of regular appointments, met with counselling services during exam periods, and emergency drop-ins rose from 25 to 102 visits by the last week of the April exam period.
Students should learn about coping skills before more stressful times come, and when they have more time and patience to attend events and develop good habits for use when they encounter crises later on.
Many students are unaware of how to cope with mental health difficulties in first year. Adjusting to a new school, home, and friends can add an extra layer of stress. Providing Thrive Week earlier on can help first-year students, in addition to upper-year ones, when it would most likely come in handy.
Carleton’s current mental health framework has not been revised since 2009 and largely focuses on crisis intervention, rather than long-term mental health support. Being proactive in preventing crises is part of Thrive Week’s overall message. In order to be proactive, it makes more sense to offer Thrive Week earlier on, which could reduce the strain of the number of crisis interventions.
Thrive Week also shouldn’t overlap with other university-sponsored weeks like International Education Week. It’s also squished into one of the most academically-demanding periods of the term, when some students don’t have enough time to think about their mental health or seek a counsellor.
Learning and talking about mental well-being must be a priority. Every year, and not only at Carleton, health and counselling services face an overload of students in crisis.
Mental health is a continuum, and students need to be constantly educated and reminded that their mental health matters. It’s also extremely important for the university to sponsor similar mental health awareness events throughout the school year.
Another option would be to make Thrive Week activities mandatory for all students, or perhaps a workshop that gives students the information they need to avoid crisis and where to go for help.
By Thrive Week, it’s too late to make as much of a difference because most students have already faced fall semester’s most stressful period. Had students learned how to “thrive” in September, perhaps they would be more likely to succeed, both personally and academically.
