Essential Interventions

For students with mental health challenges, the availability of assistance is key.

Eastern students typically find their collegiate experience to be an exciting time of personal and intellectual growth; a demanding but joyful four-year sojourn that they will long remember fondly.

But it’s also not unusual, at EWU as elsewhere, for students to find themselves caught up in mental health and substance-abuse challenges.

At Eastern, staff and faculty members are committed to ensuring that struggling students have access to the assistance they need. Now, a new federal grant will expand existing mental-health wellness and help-seeking opportunities for such students, particularly those who may be at risk for self-harm.

It’s not unusual, at EWU as elsewhere, for students to find themselves caught up in mental health and substance-abuse challenges.

The three-year, $285,000 Garret Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention Grant, awarded to the university last fall by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is helping EWU counseling and wellness staff enhance suicide-prevention training and skill-building programming across campus.

“Because of this grant, 10 staff and faculty members have already been trained as Mental Health First instructors,” says Laura Gant, associate director of wellness services. These courses, she says, teach university faculty and staff how to better identify, understand and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance-use disorders. The training can also help mitigate hesitation in starting conversations about potential problems.

Thanks to the grant, she adds, there will now be additional training opportunities: “More faculty and staff will know how to connect students to these services.”

In addition the grant funding will make possible a campus-wide collaboration to create a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable plan for addressing mental health promotion and suicide prevention on campus.

“Poor mental health can impede students’ ability to persist and complete college,” says Gant. “Expanding education and resources is essential to providing support to students at EWU.”