Mental Health & the StuCommApp: how we help your students find help
In our webinar about mental health in education, Sky Mitchell (Advanced Psychodynamic Counsellor) and Joel Gujral (co-founder at MYNDUP) told us more about the problems students are experiencing. More importantly, they gave us some more insights into the causes of these problems and how universities could better support their students. Two things stood out: easy access to mental health care and the stigma of others.
Admitting you are experiencing mental health problems is often very difficult, especially when you are a student. As a student, you have a lot of things to deal with. Expectations of your family and friends, graduate job hunting and not to mention completing your exams. Mental health problems can have a big impact on these areas of student life, so it is important students are able to get the help they need.
The help students need
After acknowledging you may benefit from counselling, the next step is to able to find this help at the university. Universities often do provide mental health care. In some cases, this is easy to access for students, in other cases not so much. Especially in those cases, it can be difficult for students to get help.
Simply going in to talk to someone can be a huge step for students. According to Sky Mitchell, there is “this stigma of other people finding out. Students are afraid of what others might think. That prevents them from getting the help they need. Students need to know that it is okay to get help; they cannot deal with these problems on their own. It is up to universities to create a safe environment and positively promote mental health care amongst students.”
StuCommApp & mental health care
At StuComm, we help universities to effectively communicate with their students. With the StuCommApp, we provide a channel that combines all the relevant information from different systems and platforms and shares that information with students on their smartphones. Amongst that information is information about the mental health care you offer. As previously mentioned previously there are two very important things that need to be addressed: easy access to mental health care and the stigma of others.
Ease of access is simple to provide in the app. You can provide students with contact information, an overview of the process they will go through to get the help and make it easy to get started. With the StuCommApp, you can deliver this information right to the smartphones of your students and get them started right away.
Secondly, being positive about students accessing mental health support is vitally important. By positively promoting mental health care from the moment students set foot on your campus, you make sure that students are not afraid to seek the help they need when they need it. You can promote mental health care physically on campus, using banners and flyers, which are really valuable, especially at the start of the academic year. After that, you can share information around your mental health provision, relevant articles and send push notifications to your students in periods when you know students will struggle, such as exam periods.
If you want to find out more about how we help you communicate mental health provision to your students, contact us!
