New Program Teaches How to Help Students with Mental Health Issues
Terriers Connect trains faculty, staff, peers to be proactive
First responders aren’t always police and firefighters who race to the scene with lights and sirens. For students facing mental health issues, the first person approached for help may be a peer, a faculty member, an RA, a coach, or an administrator. Now a new BU program is teaching those gatekeepers (defined as people in a position to recognize a crisis and the warning signs that someone may be contemplating suicide) to respond more effectively and confidently as they usher students into care.
“Faculty, staff, and students all call us saying, ‘What do I do?’” says Carrie Landa, the director of Behavioral Medicine at Student Health Services. “They’re asked by people in need all the time, and they struggle with how to have those conversations and how to encourage someone to get help when they need it.”
Behavioral Medicine and the Dean of Students office are cosponsoring the initiative, the Terriers Connect program, whose first training session last Friday drew 31 people from across campus.
“This isn’t about delivering mental health services. These people are not training to be clinicians or therapists,” Landa says. “What we are training people to do is recognize signs and know the appropriate responses and resources.”
At BU, as at other universities, the mental health of students has become a critical issue. The number of students in crisis going to Behavioral Medicine for help has more than doubled, from 290 in the 2010–2011 academic year to 647 last year. Although study results vary widely, a 2014 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health showed that about 20 percent of college students had considered suicide in the past year.
The BU program, based on the 10-year-old Campus Connect program at Syracuse University, hopes to help by training staff from many departments to identify students in crisis and to guide those students smoothly to the appropriate campus resources. The Syracuse model is used on nearly 200 other campuses in the United States and Canada. Friday’s daylong session was run by program founder Cory Wallack, director of the Syracuse University Counseling Center.
Students can face a wide variety of mental health issues, from feeling overwhelmed by classwork or a traumatic breakup to eating disorders and other serious mental health problems. “What we’re often finding is that students who come for help are so distressed that they’ve already stopped going to class or stopped socializing or stopped taking care of themselves,” says Landa. “So the idea here is to be more proactive about getting treatment.”
Cory Wallack, director of the Syracuse University Counseling Center, at a training session for the Terriers Connect program, where faculty, staff, and student leaders learn to communicate more effectively with students who have mental health issues. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
Mary Murphy-Phillips (MET’04), School of Public Health director of graduate student life, says students often approach her and colleagues because they are accessible. “Sometimes I have put people in my car to drive them over to Behavioral Medicine,” she says. “A lot of times it’s just to help them make that leap into seeing someone for counseling.”
Many problems faced by students require help from a trained therapist or counselor, and may be too much for an untrained gatekeeper. The Terriers Connect program should help those gatekeepers deal more confidently with the issues presented, and should teach them how to reach out when they recognize a student in trouble. The training includes instruction, role-playing, and a focus on empathy. But there’s also a spotlight on the feelings of the gatekeepers themselves.
“It certainly can be scary,” says Murphy-Phillips, recalling a situation where a student was unreachable for 12 hours even as she and staff at Behavioral Medicine were concerned that the person might harm himself. “It’s a lot for the administrators to handle.”
“We really need to prepare people for the emotional intensity of talking to someone in crisis,” Wallack says. “If you’re talking to someone who’s suicidal, it’s not the difficulty of asking the right questions or saying the right things—it’s the anxiety you’re going to experience in that moment. ‘What if I say the wrong thing, what if I do the wrong thing?’ And we’ve really tried to create the training to explore those fears.”
Phil DeCarlo, assistant athletic director for student athlete support services, says he would like to be more comfortable dealing with troubled students who come to him for help. “I’d like to be able to identify through conversation if they’re a danger to themselves or somebody else, to notice signs that they’re heading in a certain direction,” says DeCarlo, who describes his work as primarily academic counseling. “I’d like to be more relaxed with it, to not be scared to say something or to react a certain way. I’d like to be comfortable and confident in knowing how to deal with it.”
Program administrators hope that Terriers Connect will make it easier for first responders to refer students to Behavioral Medicine, which can mean avoiding a more acute problem down the road.
Friday’s event was an extended “train the trainers session,” where participants were taught to provide training for other members of the campus community. Behavioral Medicine will host several regular training sessions, each lasting about two hours, throughout the semester. The next session, for Residence Life administrative staff, is scheduled for January 27.
After training, Terriers Connect gatekeepers will get a sticker to put on their office or dorm room door to let students know they are welcome to come in to talk.
The program, formally known as the Campus Connect Suicide Prevention Gatekeeper Program, was developed at Syracuse during the 2005–2006 academic year with funding from a federal suicide-prevention grant. At its heart, says Wallack, it’s about listening and creating a more supportive community.
“The way to prevent suicide is you don’t let people get to that place where they’re thinking about it to begin with,” Wallack says. “Imagine if we created a campus where when you ask, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ you really listen to what the person says. What would that do for people’s sense of belonging or loneliness or isolation?”
The Terriers Connect program should have other benefits as well. “Part of this is also a destigmatization campaign,” Landa says, “making mental health something more people feel comfortable speaking about.”
Campus community members interested in Terriers Connect gatekeeper training should email terriersconnect@bu.edu.
Author, Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.