The return to campuses following the pandemic was by no means a return to "normal."
Understaffing at public colleges and universities that had been an issue before the height of the COVID-19 crisis is now even worse. But the students returning to college are demonstrating a far greater need for social and emotional support and access to mental health services.
That strain on staff and faculty creates its own pressure.
Cory Albert Griffin, director of the Employee Counseling and Consultation Office at UMass Amherst, said campus unions can play an important role in amplifying the concerns voiced by faculty and staff.
"Understaffing is a huge theme I hear about, coupled with the loss of institutional knowledge after COVID. That is coupled with students now arriving with noticeable losses in social and emotional learning," Griffin said. "The unions can play a role in making sure we don’t end up with top-down approaches to these problems. The administration needs to be listening to staff as well as to students."
Tyler Bradley, a residence director at UMass Amherst, is among those saying that understaffing is making it more challenging to provide support to students in crisis, and he called student mental health his "biggest challenge."
Students, Bradley said, are increasingly expressing that they feel under pressure to perform well, and that seeking help or support would somehow give the appearance of failing. Additionally, many students slip into isolation when they become overwhelmed.
Bradley said that colleges and universities need to be responsive to students in crisis because many young people are worried about raising these concerns with their own families.
But a challenge for universities remains the so-called "great resignation." The national wave of departures that occurred as employers called back workers when COVID cases initially fell, hit the UMass residential staff, Bradley said.
"I’m working to get staffing back to full capacity," he said. "Right now, I’m wrestling with how to prioritize the workload in a meaningful way. We’ve been training staff on having intentional conversations with students. We don’t want to just be ‘checking the box’ if a student is in crisis."
Making sure that student mental health is receiving proper attention is daunting, but not impossible.
Last fall, Berkshire Community College faculty member Paul Johansen and counselor Lisa Mattila wrote a newspaper column that advocated for all colleges and universities to follow the lead of BCC and dedicate services to support student mental health.
BCC added staff to its counseling center, connected students to other resources in the community and included mental health experts from the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities among those taking part in suicide prevention strategies.
Johansen was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Yale University that forced the Ivy League school to improve student mental health services. Johansen, a Yale graduate, joined a movement of alumni and students to hold Yale accountable for failing to address student mental health following the suicide of a student in 2021.
"College is stressful and can be a stressful time of life," Johansen said. "It’s during the time of traditional college age that schizophrenia can show up for the first time in someone who never had a previous episode. At Yale, they confused wellness with psychiatric treatment. They beefed up wellness programs, but yoga is not going to help someone experiencing clinical depression."
By contrast, with far fewer resources than Yale has, BCC responded in a meaningful way to the rising demand for student mental health services that began even before the pandemic hit, proving that colleges and universities can play a meaningful role in addressing the student mental health crisis.
"I am impressed by what BCC has available to students," he said. "There already was an anti-stigma campaign happening before the pandemic, and the college provided support during the height of the pandemic when COVID was decimating the college experience."
