--- title: Colleges Are Getting Creative to Support Mental Health description: With demand for mental-health services surging, colleges are training faculty, staff, and students to help meet demand. canonical: https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-09-21T12:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:54.188Z article:section: Health og:title: Colleges Are Getting Creative to Support Mental Health og:description: Faculty, staff, and even students are now helping to support well-being on college campuses. og:url: https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt60c126829af55a34/698a409cb3fce37b4f0cada9/college-mental-health.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2120 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: College student on campus og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Colleges Are Getting Creative to Support Mental Health twitter:description: Faculty, staff, and even students are now helping to support well-being on college campuses. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt60c126829af55a34/698a409cb3fce37b4f0cada9/college-mental-health.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # With Demand for Mental-Health Care Soaring on Campus, Faculty and Students Are Stepping Up to Help > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=c84bdf86-244e-407c-b81e-332d3abd11bd&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online [Watch (HLS stream): Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oxvh4VUE.m3u8) (4:07)  _Published 2023-08-24. The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram._  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Sep 21, 2023 12:00 PM UTC  A woman wearing a backpack walking through the entrance to a public library, A woman wearing a backpack walking through the entrance to a public library, Getty Images  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Sep 21, 2023 12:00 PM UTC After the pandemic shut down Duke University’s campus in 2020, public-policy professor Nick Carnes worried about [how his students would fare](https://time.com/5889163/remote-college-coronavirus/) both educationally and emotionally. Wanting to help in whatever way he could, he added a simple message to his email signature. “A note to students,” he wrote. “Please let me or another Duke professor know if you're having any problems with your safety, well-being, or access to educational or other resources, or if you need to talk about anything right now, and/or if you know of another student who is having trouble. When in doubt, please reach out.” Three years later, with campus back to pre-pandemic normal, Carnes hasn’t found a reason to delete the message. “A lot of students will probably roll their eyes,” he says. “But you want them to have so internalized your availability to help with a crisis that they find it sort of corny and laughable when you remind them of that.” ### More From TIME Not so long ago, it might not have been obvious that a public-policy professor would be willing to talk through his student’s stressors and struggles. But these days, with teenagers and young adults [reporting mental-health issues in record numbers](https://time.com/6255448/teen-girls-mental-health-epidemic-causes/), Carnes is part of a growing trend. Colleges have long offered on-campus health and counseling centers, but demand for mental-health support is [surging such that many schools can’t meet it through traditional means](https://time.com/5190291/anxiety-depression-college-university-students/). Rather than solely recruiting more therapists—a costly and difficult proposition, given that the U.S. behavioral-health field is [short thousands of needed clinicians](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/explainer/2023/may/understanding-us-behavioral-health-workforce-shortage)—colleges and universities across the U.S. are leaning on [faculty](https://time.com/6244601/laurie-santos-happiness-professor-beats-burnout/), staff, and even students to help bridge the gap. “The mental-health crisis is significantly increasing the demand for services and we have fewer people coming into the profession and a lot of people leaving the profession,” says Sarah Reives-Houston, who runs a behavioral-health program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Expanding the availability of community support is a faster and more feasible—not to mention more affordable—approach than training up a new generation of therapists, and one that could ultimately be more effective, Reives-Houston says, because it "broadens the net." ## Training faculty, staff and students UNC has so far coached more than 900 faculty, staff, and students in [Mental Health First Aid](https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/), a [research-backed](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0197102) program that teaches people to identify and respond to signs of mental distress in others. Participation is mostly voluntary and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Reives-Houston says demand has been highest among faculty and staff specializing in “helping professions,” such as nursing and social work. In the future, she says, the school plans to focus its recruitment in departments like business and the sciences to reach more people. The need is clear. In [a survey](https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/HMS%5FNational-Report-2022-2023%5Ffull.pdf) taken by about 7,000 U.S. college students during the 2022-2023 academic year, 41% reported recent symptoms of depression, 36% said they’d recently felt anxiety, and 14% said they’d considered suicide in the past year. [Another survey](https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II%5FFall%5F2018%5FUndergraduate%5FReference%5FGroup%5FData%5FReport.pdf) from a few years prior found that 60% of students had experienced “overwhelming” anxiety and half said they’d been so depressed it was difficult to function. Carnes, the Duke professor, admits it can be daunting to help when students reach out to talk. “I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a therapist,” he says. “There’s always a fear in my mind, ‘What if a student asks me a question I don’t know how to answer?’ But I had to get over that fear, because when students do ask things I can’t answer, I can still refer them to people who can.” The responsibility to ensure students “not only do their best, but feel their best” can’t stop at the campus counseling center, says Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who recently became president of Dartmouth. During their college years, young adults are “acquiring the skills and habits that will be with \[them\] forever,” Beilock says. “It’s such an important time to make sure that students are equipped with the tools to help themselves.” To that end, when Beilock took the reins at Dartmouth earlier this year, she debuted a campus well-being plan that includes training on Mental Health First Aid and [suicide prevention](https://time.com/5709368/how-to-solve-suicide/) for many faculty and staff; the creation of a new chief health and wellness officer position; and a policy that allows students to take time away from academics to tend to their mental or physical health without losing campus access and while receiving financial assistance for health insurance, if necessary. Starting as early as elementary education, schools often act as a “de facto mental health hub,” for students, says Dr. Asha Patton-Smith, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with Kaiser Permanente in Virginia. Students go to school almost every day—or, in the case of many college students, live there 24/7\. It can be easier to deliver care in this familiar and accessible environment, rather than leaving young people to navigate the traditional mental health system, with its [high price tags, long waits, and inadequate supply of clinicians](https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/). **Read More:** [**_Why College Is a Risky Time For Students' Mental Health_**](https://time.com/4473575/college-mental-health-guidebook/) Studies show this approach works at various levels of schooling. Among adolescents, school-based health programs can improve well-being and reduce suicidal ideation, drug use, and risky sexual behavior, [according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention](https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/whatworks/index.htm). On college campuses, meanwhile, there’s evidence to support programs that teach coping skills and mindfulness, as well as regular screenings for mental-health issues, according to a [report from the American Council on Education](https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/What-Works-Mental-Health.pdf) (ACE). But the ACE report also notes that programs meant to train non-professionals in mental-health support aren’t universally shown to be effective in studies. After training, participants typically report more knowledge about mental health and more confidence about the idea of intervening if someone is in need—but that doesn’t always translate to _actually_ intervening, nor does it mean the person who is struggling goes on to receive formal care. “We are not recommending the complete abandonment” of these programs, the authors write in the ACE report, but they shouldn’t be a campus’ only solution. Peer support is one approach that can augment these programs—and one in use at schools like Washington University in St. Louis, which operates Uncle Joe’s Peer Counseling and Resource Center, a hotline through which students can talk with trained peer counselors 24/7\. In-person office hours are also available from the college-student-friendly hours of 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., and the programs’ volunteers can connect students with other resources on campus or in the community if necessary. ## Receiving help from peers “Unlike traditional counseling where you might have a counselor who’s 20 or 30 years older than you, we’re at a similar spot in life,” says Mallory Leff, a senior who co-directs the program. “Being able to talk to someone who seems closer to a friend than an adult is an easier step for people to take.” Bringing peers together is the cornerstone of nonprofit [Radical Hope’s program](https://radicalhopefoundation.org/), too. The group trains students at dozens of colleges across the country—including New York University, Northeastern University, and Delaware State University—to lead a free four-week curriculum designed to help their peers learn self-care, social-connection, and coping skills. The idea, says CEO Liz Feld, is to help students improve well-being and build resilience before they reach a crisis point. “A lot of the issues that they’re dealing with are not issues that should ever rise to the level of needing clinical help,” Feld says. “What they really need is to talk to people who’ve had similar experiences, who share their thoughts and fears and anxieties and excitement about this chapter in their lives.” That rings true for Delaney Dardet, who co-directs Uncle Joe’s with Leff in St. Louis. “We can’t have the same experiences as someone else,” she says. “But just to know that there’s another voice and ear on campus that you can talk to” can make all the difference. ## Transcript For mental health issues you might be avoiding right now. One, you don't have the life you had before the pandemic. You never will again. When the pandemic was happening and everyone was experiencing lots of like mental health issues, it put a spotlight on mental health creators that were posting online. You can't love someone else until you love yourself as bullsht. Because one end implies that people with low self-esteem or mental health issues are incapable of loving others. Just so. With that, I have a disclaimer on my, you know, TikTok and Instagram that this is not therapy or my mental health pics are not specifically tailored to you. Sure, I'm a licensed therapist, but I'm not your lessons therapist. All the online spaces where I share content. Yes. Even those livestreams where you shoot me questions are not therapy sessions, so I want somebody to like taking my content and then think about it and analyze it. Therapy speak is a new way of saying psychobabble. They're usually more like vulnerable words that talk about like the primary emotions that you're experiencing. But there's other ways that people are using that language, hurt people or manipulate people or control people or sort of like shut down conversations. There's a difference between selfishness and grandiosity and narcissism. It's very rare that you would be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. They tend to believe everything is everyone else's fault, and it comes out of early childhood. There is a stage of development where your ego is separate from other people's ego, and you're able to see that both of those are important. Something is wrong and that development and it leads someone having a really hard time seeing other people's needs as important as their own. Gaslighting is a pretty popular term these days, and what it means is somebody is trying to manipulate you into believing in a reality that's not true. But sometimes people are like, What? You're disagreeing with me. You're not validating my experience, you're gaslighting me, which is not actually what they're doing. So if you say that somebody is a gaslighter, that can be like a pretty incendiary accusation. You and I think that everybody should clearly express what their boundaries are in relationships. It's sort of like a blueprint that you'll offer somebody. So a healthy boundary that somebody might create is I'm not going to continue talking to you if you start to yell at me a different way to use boundaries. That's not exactly correct is to try to control somebody's behavior and manipulate somebody's behavior. You're allowed to say, I don't want to go to dinner, right? That's a boundary. But to be like, you know, well, I'll go if you go to this kind of place, but I'm not going to go if you go to this kind of place and you can't tell me, I can't because I'm allowed to set boundaries. Right. You're now like over stating it. Five small but very brave green flags in a relationship. One you sense their connection with you throughout the day. We keep talking for decades and decades and decades in the field of how we can improve mental health. And the reality is, is that the way you improve anything is with education. Therapists and Instagram and YouTube could do a better job at verifying their licenses and degrees and trainings that therapists have. And if therapists and mental health professionals didn't have to talk about things in coded ways like eating disorders or social justice or anxiety or depression or suicidality, then I think that there could be like some really good education happening online. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/"},"headline":"With Demand for Mental-Health Care Soaring on Campus, Faculty and Students Are Stepping Up to Help","datePublished":"2023-09-21T12:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:50:54.188Z","description":"Faculty, staff, and even students are now helping to support well-being on college campuses.","url":"https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/","keywords":["Mental Health","healthscienceclimate"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt60c126829af55a34/698a409cb3fce37b4f0cada9/college-mental-health.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jamie Ducharme","jobTitle":"Ducharme is a contributor to TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt60c126829af55a34/698a409cb3fce37b4f0cada9/college-mental-health.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"College student on campus","caption":"College student on campus","creditText":"Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/mental-health/","name":"Mental Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6316217/college-mental-health-programs/","name":"With Demand for Mental-Health Care Soaring on Campus, Faculty and Students Are Stepping Up to Help"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online","description":"The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. 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