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Lois Thetford, a physician’s assistant in the UW’s MEDEX Northwest program, is currently developing a course for the UW’s Health Sciences program that focuses on homelessness. The two-credit class will be offered during winter 2017 and will feature input from staff members of the health sciences. The class will explore homelessness through various lenses, such as “homelessness and racism,” to give students a better understanding of the reality of homelessness for those that live it. Thetford...

Childhood bullying inflicts the same long-term psychological trauma on girls as severe physical or sexual abuse, suggests a new survey of college students. The study, which involved 480 college freshmen through seniors, indicated that the detrimental effects of bullying may linger for years, negatively affecting victims’ mental health well into young adulthood. While most of the scholarship on bullying has focused on kindergarten through 12th-grade students, the struggles revealed by college...

The Need for Trauma-Informed Curricula at Institutions of Higher Learning: A Call to Action On October 20th, Children's Crisis Treatment Center , The Philadelphia University Community and Trauma Counseling Program and the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey are hosting a very special and important conversation for any one who is involved in training the next generation of service professionals - nurses, doctors, social workers, teachers, lawyers, community health...

Today’s college students seek campus counseling services more often than any other generation in the modern history of the United States. Most of those who report mental-health challenges cite anxiety and depression as their top concerns. In last year’s 10-year summary report , the Center for Collegiate Mental Health set out to determine whether the overall growth in enrollment at universities was responsible for the increased usage of these services by retrospectively comparing the growth...

The impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)— childhood experiences of abuse, neglect and family dysfunction—on the health and wellbeing of college students nationwide is relatively unknown. And yet, approximately two-thirds of University of Minnesota students experience at least one adverse childhood experience before entering college. On Friday, Dec. 2, the U of M will host a one-day conference that brings together college administrators, educators, students, public health...

When I was a sophomore in college, our campus looked like a prison. My classmates and I walked to class between eight-foot tall chain-linked fences. Security guards patrolled bridges around the Ivy League school. It was 2010 and, in the last academic year, six students had killed themselves at Cornell University . Two jumped off bridges into the Ithaca gorges on consecutive days in March. Classmates anxiously checked in on one another. Parents panicked. The administration scrambled to...

The toolkit is designed to aid faculty and teachers in a variety of disciplines, specifically social work, medicine, law, education, and counseling, to develop or integrate critical content on adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care into new or existing curricula of graduate education programs. This toolkit provides an overview of colleges and universities that have courses in trauma-informed practice and ACEs science. Most of the toolkit comprises content for a course on...

Colleges and universities generally try to make information about mental health services accessible to students. But at Northwestern University, students may start seeing such information in a surprising place: syllabi. Wanting the campus to be “accessible and welcoming to all students,” Northwestern’s Faculty Senate last week passed a resolution encouraging “all faculty to include language in their syllabi similar to the following: ‘If you find yourself struggling with your mental or...

While one could argue that every action that the Texas legislature takes is important and should be evaluated, the sheer volume of bills they pass makes that impractical. It is our duty as citizens and as students to look at the policies that affect us personally. For many students here at the University of Houston, one of those issues is higher education and/or mental health resources. In November 2015, Speaker Joe Straus formed the Select Committee to look at the behavioral health system...

For Provost Susan R. Wente, the meaning of mental health and wellness from the university’s standpoint means encouraging a culture of openness and honest discussion about mental health and wellbeing. “Mental health and wellbeing to us means really having a healthier community that’s very transparent and willing to share with one another what our challenges are and how to help one another, and that mental health and wellbeing does not at all infer that we think everyone has to be, and will...

As a parent, you’ve watched your child grow from infancy to adolescence and now your son or daughter is entering a whole new world. While most kids will get through college just fine, others find themselves on a different, more precarious path. According to the latest results from the National College Health Assessment , many college students experience mental health difficulties. More than 1 in 5 felt overwhelming anxiety in the 12 months prior to the survey. In addition, 18 percent felt...

There's no way to avoid it. As the cost of college grows, research shows that so does the number of hungry and homeless students at colleges and universities across the country. Still, many say the problem is invisible to the public. "It's invisible even to me and I'm looking," says Wick Sloan. He came to Bunker Hill Community College in Boston more than a decade ago to teach English full time. He says it felt like he quickly became a part-time social worker, too. "When I first got here, I...