College can be a daunting thing for many. It’s their first time out on their own in a potentially unfamiliar environment. It can be extremely easy to succumb to the collegiate pressures that can damage one’s mental health.
73% of students have experienced a mental health crisis while in college and only 25% of students seek help with their mental health problems, according to the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds.
Emporia State has a duty to its students’ well-being and must do better at providing care for its students than they do now. It is no longer enough to only offer counseling, a couple of seminars and online pamphlets. Mental health is a serious aspect of each and every person’s life and should be treated with care.
While we can commend the university for keeping counseling sessions at low costs and for offering five free sessions per semester, we know ESU can do better. We’d like to see ESU offer more campus-wide courses or initiatives rooted in educating and helping students understand their own mental health. One way the university could go about doing that would be by expanding the mental health units in health courses. They could also go as far as creating a required general education course solely designed for teaching students about their mental health.
Another suggestion would be to offer a wider variety of mental health care professionals and not just counselors. Some students may need more extensive help such as needing a psychiatrist and not a psychologist. We also don’t offer different kinds of therapy such as couples counseling or regularly scheduled group therapy. The university should make these also accessible to all students year round. We could offer once a month group sessions for various and more specific topics such as eating disorders or specific mental health condition based meetings.
We should also be allowed to seek therapy during winter and spring breaks along with during dead and finals week. Dead week is called dead week for a reason. The lead up to finals is extremely stressful and we all have an end of semester freak out anecdote in our back pocket.
However, we do tip our hats to ESU for extending counseling services through summer break for those who are either enrolled in summer classes or are enrolled in the following fall semester. There is however one downside to this, students who live out of state and are home for the summer will not be able to participate in online counseling sessions according to the health and wellness office.
At the end of the day, the fight for our mental health will always be an uphill battle. If ESU is as accessible and as helpful as possible to its students, we will thrive and so will the university. We also ask you to keep in mind that this is not the fault of the Counseling Center but of the university. All who work in the center also deserve as much support and opportunity as we do. So we call upon Emporia State, heal your campus.