I have served as President of Colorado State University for 11 years, and during my tenure we have had 60 students or recent graduates die by suicide. Sixty promising lives cut short. Sixty families devastated. Sixty times our campus community had to ask why.
It’s a critical issue facing every campus in the country. According to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, for the past eight academic years, nationally, there have been increases in rates of self-harm, serious suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts among students seeking counseling on campus. Tragically, 1,196 college students in the United States took their own lives over this same period.
Perhaps most alarming is that suicide only represents part of the campus mental health crisis. A 2017 Healthy Minds Study reported that 74 percent of students said their mental health had negatively impacted their academic performance in the previous four weeks. With this, college counseling centers are inundated and struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Addressing this issue must be one of the top priorities of higher education, beginning with college presidents on every campus.
This is a challenge we have undertaken in earnest at Colorado State University, and there are lessons from our experience we believe can be helpful for others. In 2010, CSU took a major step in creating a united front to address mental health issues by integrating our counseling and medical facilities into a single system. While this transition created a unified front that supported mental wellness within the CSU Health Network, we were still missing a campus-wide approach that supports each and every student 24 hours a day.
Five years ago, our Student Health team decided to take bold action. We decided the best defense would be a good offense and that the most successful approach to suicide prevention would be an upstream, early intervention model that connected with students well before they were in crisis. The big “aha” for our team was when we realized the more we encouraged well-being in all aspects of our students’ lives, the more we were proactively encouraging them to be self-aware and take charge of their health. We took an innovative approach to our model and designed a new way to help students navigate life and campus, especially in that important first year.
The key finding from the research was clear: everyone is on their own journey, wrestling with their own personal issues. We realized it wasn’t just about mental health, but about supporting students in a more comprehensive way. This led to a number of critical initiatives – including the launch of a mobile food pantry, expanded counseling resources, enhanced support for student veterans, an increase in scholarship aid for our lowest-income students, a focus on high-impact practices that support student success, and an overriding message that Rams Take Care of Rams.
Still, we saw gaps in our ability to leverage all of these resources in a way that was easily accessible to students. With that in mind, CSU entered into a unique public/private partnership with Grit Digital Health. Together, we developed “YOU at College,” a digital solution that personalizes well-being for each student. The portal –– called YOU@CSU on our campus –– takes a comprehensive approach to well-being by providing utility for each student across three domains of wellness: Succeed (academic and career success), Thrive (mental and physical health) and Matter (meaning and campus connections). It supports students with whatever challenge, no matter how big or small, creating an accessible, all-in-one tool to help students.
We launched YOU@CSU to our entire campus community in the spring of 2016. In surveying users, 87 percent of students discovered new campus resources, and 76 percent of students reported improved stress management. In addition to its success at CSU, one of the best aspects of the technology is its scalability to support a growing network of campuses committed to student well-being. YOU at College is now on 30 campuses nationwide, ranging from large public universities to private schools and community colleges.
This is a wonderful tool – but it’s not a magic wand. Students are still struggling. But with YOU@CSU, in combination with a robust campus support network, we are beginning to help students understand they are not alone in times of crisis – or any time they need a helping hand. It will take each and every good idea to make progress against the student mental health crisis. But working together, pooling and sharing our innovations and utilizing technology and the private sector, we can make an important difference. The lives entrusted, however briefly, to our care demand nothing less than our sustained and best effort.
Tony Frank is president of Colorado State University. He is retiring in June.
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