Boston University Student Mental Health Services Honored in Princeton Review Project
One of 16 colleges named to inaugural 2025 list, which highlights schools demonstrating exceptional commitment to mental health and wellbeing

Boston University is one of the 16 colleges named to the Princeton Review’s Mental Health Honor Roll for 2025. BU was recognized for its 180-plus mental health and wellbeing resources, including robust education and prevention programs. Photo by Elena Chernykh/iStock
Boston University Student Mental Health Services Honored in Princeton Review Project
One of 16 colleges named to inaugural 2025 list, which highlights schools demonstrating exceptional commitment to mental health and wellbeing
Boston University is one of 16 colleges named to the Princeton Review’s 2025 Mental Health Services Honor Roll, an inaugural list of schools recognized for the ways they help students facing mental health challenges. “Mental health and wellness are ingrained in the BU experience,” the University’s citation says, while peer resources were praised for helping Terriers “identify signs of distress, develop effective skills for communicating with and supporting students.”
The honor roll is one part of the education services organization’s new College Mental Health Project. The project comes amid a national reckoning on mental health. The United States made headlines in 2024 when it dropped out of the top 20 countries in Gallup’s World Happiness Report, with widespread dissatisfaction and loneliness reported by Americans under 30 largely responsible for the drop. On college campuses, the need for mental health support has become increasingly critical; according to one recent study cited by the Princeton Review, two in five undergraduates report mental health issues significantly interfering with their ability to learn, focus, and perform academically.
The Princeton Review project is a “multifaceted yearlong project designed to promote mental health resources on college campuses as well as student awareness of them,” reads its website. The inaugural honor roll list, the organization writes, is intended to “benefit students looking for, heading to, or currently enrolled in colleges; that they might see the types of services provided,” and highlights universities that have shown a strong commitment to their students’ mental health and wellbeing.
The 16 schools, which include the University of San Diego, Columbia University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were selected from almost 250 institutions that reported to the organization’s annual campus mental health survey. Broadly, the Princeton Review writes, the schools named to the honor roll were judged on three criteria: that policies and administrative support include campus mental health and wellbeing; that students have a quality of life attentive to wellbeing; and how well a university empowers students to address their mental health through available resources.
The Princeton Review commended BU for its breadth of services, which include 180-plus wellbeing programs, events, and learning opportunities available to students.
The distinction recognizes the efforts of BU’s Student Health Services (SHS), which provides mental health and wellbeing support through its affiliated departments Behavioral Medicine, Health Promotion & Prevention (HPP), and the Sexual Assault Response & Prevention Center (SARP), in addition to the Student Wellbeing office.
“This recognition is incredibly meaningful to all of us at SHS, and particularly those who are engaged in mental health, health promotion, and prevention work,” says Judy Platt, BU’s chief health officer and executive director of Student Health Services. “It will continue to inspire us to learn from our students and colleagues as we work collectively to impact the student experience. We are also grateful to University leadership as they have prioritized mental health and made our work possible.”
Of course, the recognition doesn’t mean BU’s work on mental health services is done, says Kara Cattani, director of BU Behavioral Medicine. But being recognized by the Princeton Review shows “that we are paying attention—and we’re actually doing a pretty good job of providing mental health support, especially for a center that serves such a large student population,” Cattani says.
An evolution of services
Mental health offerings at BU have come a long way.
About a decade ago, the approach to mental health on campus was akin to fishing students out of a river, rather than building a railing to keep them from falling into the water in the first place. Nationally, college students were reporting more and more mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, and few campus health centers were prepared to sufficiently address the influx and the growing crisis.
At BU, emergency services were always available, but lower-level needs were harder to meet, Platt says. SHS was understaffed; students could wait weeks to be seen for mental health visits. Employees were wearing multiple hats as case managers, psychologists, referral coordinators, and crisis interventionists. Significant prevention and education efforts simply weren’t something the department had bandwidth to handle. Health Promotion & Prevention, meanwhile, was working on prevention—but mostly related to safe sex and substance use.
Things began to change around 2016.
A BU task force had produced a report several years prior suggesting sweeping changes to SHS. The changes were so large that it was difficult to know where to start. Platt, a former SHS physician, was hired as the interim director in 2014 (and later promoted to permanent director). Her first charge? Dig into the report and prioritize the most pressing needs.

Platt, along with former Behavioral Medicine director Carrie Landa, now executive director of Student Wellbeing, and others, began working on ways to improve the SHS system. Their inaugural area of focus: mental health services.
The first thing they did was to open a satellite clinic on BU’s Medical Campus. They also made small but significant changes to the intake system: establishing a triage process, expanding the number of available appointments every week, and allowing students to make appointments online.
Additional changes reduced the mental health co-pay and eliminated the cap on how many mental health visits students on the Aetna Student Health Insurance Plan could access per year. Behavioral Medicine started a support groups program and hired a coordinator. Other staffing increases followed, including clinicians as well as promotion of a wellness coordinator to mental health promotion assistant director.
Over time, “that helped set up a more effective collaboration between HPP and SHS,” Platt says. “We thought, instead of working in separate spaces, how could we leverage the strengths of experts in other departments and do prevention work in all of these areas?” Their collaboration led to creating programs like Terriers Connect, a suicide prevention training for students, faculty, and staff to learn how to help individuals in distress.
“The Terriers Connect Program forms the core of BU’s peer-to-peer resources and teaches participants to identify signs of distress, develop effective skills for communicating with and supporting students, and provide accurate information about referrals to mental health professionals,” the Princeton Review writes in evaluating the program. “Graduates of the program help to form a robust network within the BU community of people students in distress can turn to.”
Another joint effort: the Wellbeing Project, a 2019 program started by HPP and Behavioral Medicine that offers seed grants to students and staff to start wellbeing initiatives in their BU communities. Since launching, grants have been used for such things as holding yoga workshops around campus, hosting a dodgeball tournament for medical students (yes, really!), and planting trees during a BU London Study Abroad outing. The Wellbeing Project is now part of Student Wellbeing.
True mental health support extends beyond clinical offerings, BU administrators say.
“We know that there’s a mental health crisis affecting every college campus in the country, and we’ve worked really hard to respond to that with intention, in a way that is multipronged, and in many ways mirrors a public health approach,” says Katharine Mooney (SPH’12), HPP director.
“Yes, it’s important to increase capacity in counseling centers and create the appropriate clinical services—but we have to think bigger and more holistically than that,” she continues. “Not every student needs therapy, so how do we make sure we’re supporting our community with training, education, and awareness of the resources that exist?”
Student-led development
Today, Student Health Services offers robust prevention programming through HPP, SARP, and Behavioral Medicine. The SHS clinical services include individual therapy, group therapy (through nearly 20 support groups), psychiatry, sports psychology, 24/7 crisis support, and provider referrals. SHS also provides internships for BU graduate students pursuing degrees in mental health professions. Outside of the clinic, students can take a community training, participate in mindfulness programs and events across BU campuses, order free sleep and stress kits, and interact with student ambassadors at the GSU and at events like the yearly World Mental Health Day, where BU community members can take free mental health screenings, talk to SHS staffers, and get connected to resources.
Student Wellbeing, meanwhile, centers its work around the seven dimensions of wellbeing. The office specializes in skill- and confidence-building offerings, from money-management education to workshops on recognizing imposter syndrome. It is also responsible for initiatives like the BU Food Pantry and maintains a centralized resource tool that students can use to search for resources available to them, such as the free meditation app Headspace. (Find more mental health resources at BU here.)

So much of what BU offers has come from listening to students about their needs.
Student ambassador programs and graduate fellowships, an SHS student advisory board, a partnership with BU Student Government, regular surveys like the Healthy Minds Study—the feedback coming into all of the offices is constant, administrators say.
“We’re able to be responsive because we’re all continually communicating about what trends the Behavioral Medicine clinicians are seeing or what my programming team is hearing from conversations with students in different spaces,” Mooney says.
For example: discussions with Student Government let the offices know that students were interested in more low-key peer-to-peer support offerings. That led to creating All Ears, a peer listening program, and adopting Togetherall, a clinically moderated, social media–like peer support platform.
“Having that two-way relationship leads to clinical services and preventive messaging being better,” Mooney says. “That kind of collaborative relationship certainly doesn’t exist everywhere.”
Going forward
Just about everything is connected to mental health and wellbeing. Over the years, BU has fully understood and embraced that, says BU Wellbeing’s Landa.
“Mental health isn’t just in the four walls of a clinician’s office,” Landa says. “Students’ living and academic spaces impact their mental health, and how we engage as a campus—the dialogue and the respect we have for each other—impacts our mental health. I think part of what got us onto the [Princeton Review] honor roll is that our leaders truly understand that a campus functions [best] when wellbeing [is integrated into everything we do].”
There’s still progress to be made, of course. The administrators know that frustrations with the system exist. But they hope being recognized by the Princeton Review helps students and parents realize that issues are being acknowledged and worked on by a dedicated team.
And if nothing else, they hope the distinction helps students feel more empowered to take ownership of their mental health and to utilize the care at their disposal.
“I think that it’s particularly important to pay attention to mental health as college students because we’re in a very transformative part of our lives,” Tori Ingulli (CAS’24, COM’24), an SHS student ambassador, recently told BU Today. “We’re balancing so many different things, and BU students are very passionate and sometimes overwork themselves. It’s important to know that while being a student is inherently difficult, there are resources embedded in the community that are there to support them through these challenges.”
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