In August, the Greater Princeton Branch of AYLUS (GPA) collaborated with many other branches for the newest edition of newspapers to promote youth volunteerism. Editors across the country worked together to have this newsletter published on a monthly basis. Besides the AYLUS announcement, the two-page newsletter covers unique volunteering activities at nationwide branches. We expect this monthly newsletter to help improve communication among AYLUS members nationwide and advocate for the concept of community service wherever it applies.
Editor-in-Chief: Lana Cheng (8/1, 3 hrs; 8/11, 3 hrs; 8/13, 3 hrs)
Advisor: Cassie Wang (8/1, 3 hrs; 8/11, 3 hrs; 8/14, 3 hrs)
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Catherine Feng (Art: 8/13, 5 hrs), Kathie Wang (8/6, 3 hrs), Brenna Li (8/6, 3 hrs)
Art Editors: Daniel Feng (8/13, 4 hrs), Danica Xiong (8/13, 4 hrs)
Article Editors (8/1, 2 hrs for all): Alyssa Jin, Amy Wu, Brigitte Shi, Catherine Harman, Claire Tang, Emma Liu, Gina Shen, Jerry Chen, Luna Chen, Megan Wang, Meiqi Tan, Parker Liu, Sophie Liu, Tom Purui Cui.
AYLUS Times Advisor & National Honorary President Cassie Wang (8/4, 3 hrs; 8/6, 3 hrs; 8/9, 3 hrs; 8/28, 3 hrs; https://illo2023.columbiaspectator.com/) continues volunteering at the Columbia Daily Spectator as the Senior Illustration Editor.
Let’s talk: Finding community through mental health discussion
Columbia seeks to better students’ minds, but does it really? Columbia is rooted in an academically and socially rigorous culture that pervades all aspects of daily life and can be straining to students’ mental health—and it needs to be talked about more. What are the mental health experiences of Columbia students? In this episode of Pod-Tone 292, reporter Kelly Warner explores these questions.
Transcript:
Content warning: This episode contains mentions of mental illness and depression. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, students on and off campus may contact the Counseling and Psychological Services clinician-on-call, available 24/7, at (212) 854-2878 or contact 988, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
[Kelly Warner]: My name is Kelly Warner and you’re listening to Pod-Tone 292, a Columbia Daily Spectator podcast.
Mental health is a hot topic in Columbia’s student communities.
Columbia boasts of providing an academic environment to “engage the best minds” and further “human understanding,” according to its website. In doing so, Columbia students are engaged in a culture of academic and social rigor that can be a strain on one’s mental health. While pursuing an education at Columbia, many students experience difficulties maintaining their “best mind.”
So how do Columbia students really feel? And what resources are there for students when they need help?
Michelle Mardones is a Barnard junior and executive board member for the mental health student organization Active Minds. Active Minds aims to increase mental health awareness by providing mental health support resources. It also provides students with a safe space for discussion of mental health concerns.
Michelle found the demanding academic and social environment at Columbia to have its advantages, but also noted the lack of conversation about shared student mental health experiences.
[Michelle Mardones]: So when I think about mental health at Barnard, I do think that there’s something to say about the hustle culture that exists at Barnard, at Columbia, that, for some reason, it took me a while to sort of classify as hustle culture, as part of something that was hurting my mental health in a lot of ways, because it’s so normalized, I feel like. And, you know, though there’s a lot of advantages to being part of the hustle culture, and, you know, just grinding it out and worrying about grades, getting internships, I feel like there’s this sort of place, there’s this sort of space that’s lacking, where we kind of slow down as a community and talk about how we’re feeling. It feels like a lot of the times people just sort of put up a front and say they’re tired or they’re stressed. But it never really gets deeper than that.
I feel like if I have a conversation about it, it’s in Active Minds, or my close friends, but that’s about it. The closest we get to it, I feel like in our classes, is when we’re talking about wellness statements.
I feel like in a lot of ways, like it’s sort of normalized that you’re here. Okay, so you’re stressed, or depressed, or maybe both. And that’s just the way it is. There’s the culture here that exists where you have to wait until it’s more extreme for it to be talked about, which I feel like, I don’t know, I see a lot of use in preventative care. When I think about preventative care, I think about therapy, I think about providing resources to students who think they might be stressed before it gets to that point where they feel like they can’t even deal with their classes.
[Kelly]: Michelle, like many students, feels the absence of discussion about mental health concerns, such as stress and depression, in the Columbia and Barnard community. Michelle’s description of the culture of silence reflects a larger issue surrounding mental health at Columbia.
While going to the University for support may not feel accessible to some students, there is also the option to find solace in student-led mental health organizations, such as Nightline.
Nightline is a late night, anonymous, peer-listening hotline for the Columbia and Barnard community. Nightline consists of trained undergraduate Columbia students that work the phone lines to provide the opportunity for callers to be heard in a nonjudgmental manner.
Helena Cirne is a current senior at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She formerly held the positions of director and peer listener at Nightline. She believes Nightline provides a necessary outlet allowing students to feel heard, even at late hours in the night.
[Helena Cirne]: I think a lot of times there’s a gap in between when CPS is open, or when support groups are open. And at nighttime is usually where that gap is, and it’s usually also the time where people really start overthinking, and everything starts to get really overwhelming, and feel really unmanageable. So I think it’s really important to have a service that can try and fill in some of that and help people, you know, talk through whatever they’re going through.
[Kelly]: While Helena posits that Nightline fills a gap in the mental health resources made available to Columbia students, she also describes Nightline as a short-term mental health service.
[Helena]: Nightline I think, is a wonderful service provider on campus. But I think it is a temporary one, it’s not meant to be a long-term service. And I think within that caveat, you kind of have to understand that, you know, you might only speak to a person once. But once was enough, you know. The point of Nightline is to help someone get through the night with whatever they’re dealing with. So I think that kind of like perspective helped me a bit, but I definitely think there are still like, calls that I’ll carry around my whole life just because they really touched me in a way and I, you know, will think of those people.
[Kelly]: Nightline is not the only mental health student organization servicing the vital needs of the Columbia student body. As mentioned previously, Active Minds also plays an important part in the Columbia mental health community.
Alyssa Sales is a Columbia College senior. She has been the co-president of Active Minds for the past two years. Her experiences in Active Minds gave her perspective on the necessity of further mental health support for the Columbia and Barnard student bodies.
[Alyssa Sales]: To be able to support someone, you have to be able to empathize with them and be able to really hear their story and understand that listening to someone is more than just listening to what they have to say, but hearing what they have to say.
[Kelly]: In Active Minds, Sales makes an effort to hear and listen to some of the stories of Columbia’s student community. Sales describes a recent Active Minds initiative, which aimed to destigmatize mental health struggles.
[Alyssa]: And so recently, we put on a panel with different people of various backgrounds to really talk about mental health.
I think it’s really important that we treat mental health like a right because I think it is a right. And in the panel, we talked a lot about how health is more than just the absence of disease.
[Kelly]: Initiatives such as panel discussions are helpful to highlight the importance of mental health.
Active Minds is constantly considering new ways to address the mental health needs of Columbia students. However, Sales understands that Active Minds is unable to meet the needs of all Columbia students. Similar to Nightline, Active Minds is an organization for short-term support.
For long-term support, Columbia students turn to Columbia Counseling and Psychological Services. Sales describes the difficulties of seeking long-term mental health services.
[Alyssa Sales]: It’s hard to find the time to actually do it. And so like, I think my friends and I, we’ve helped our other friends literally schedule the appointment just because it can be so daunting, especially if you’re not in that mind space.
[Kelly]: Active Minds also hopes to address this need in the Columbia community with an initiative to assist students with the process of securing long-term mental health services.
[Alyssa]: It can be really daunting to even schedule an intake session at CPS. And even just having someone be there helping, having someone help you navigate the website can really make a difference.
We could help people sign up for therapy through their insurance or like help sign up through CPS, that kind of thing, just because it can be a really scary process. And it can be even scarier to do it alone.
[Kelly]: Sales observed a lack of support provided to students looking to obtain mental health counseling resources. Sales hopes to address this need through her Active Minds initiative.
However, being a full-time student, Sales, like Mardones, also experiences and deals with the implications of the Columbia “hustle culture.” Student efforts to address Columbia mental health needs provide essential support. But is it realistic to expect students like Sales and Cirne to not only maintain their own mental health, but also support the mental health of their peers?
Ultimately, long-term support must be sought elsewhere. As Sales described, there are barriers posed for Columbia students to obtain long-term mental health support using CPS. Mental health should be treated as a right, not a commodity.
Tess Fallon, a senior in SEAS, agrees. She believes that difficulties in obtaining mental health support at Columbia and Barnard are an urgent issue. She reframes this challenge as if it were related to physical health to emphasize the importance of effective mental health support.
[Tess Fallon]: Well, if you were a doctor, and you came in, and, like, a sick person had strep throat, you would still give them antibiotics even if they didn’t have pneumonia yet. So that’s how I like to describe it to my dad because he doesn’t always understand mental health as a physical, like something that students physically need regular treatment for.
[Kelly]: This lack of understanding and awareness of the need for mental health support spurred Fallon to take action. Recently, Fallon created a petition to demand increased mental health support for Columbia students.
[Tess]: So the petition was, I guess, more so an open letter and a petition to the Columbia administration, asking them to sort of, (a) understand the mental health crisis that, I believe, is currently going on at Columbia University and beyond in education. I think that there’s a little bit of a gap of understanding between, you know, what administrators think they’re giving us and what we actually see when we go to try to use those alleged resources.
[Kelly]: Fallon continued to outline the needs of the Columbia community that informed the demands of her petition.
[Tess]: And those four demands were, in essence, expanding the access to psychologists and psychiatrists by increasing the staff, either by therapy, like telehealth, or in person—we understand that there’s space constraints.
So the second main demand was requiring that providers meet with students at least once a week, because how it currently stands is that students that aren’t triaged are put on it every two- or three-week basis. And so what that basically means is like, if you don’t meet certain criteria for being at risk for harm, they put you, like, outside of this triage, and you get put on, maybe you can meet with your CPS provider once every two or three weeks, which I don’t believe is sufficient.
[Kelly]: Columbia mental health services are lacking, and the Columbia student body agrees.
[Tess]: It’s not just some number on a screen when you see like, oh, there’s like 1,500, 1,600 signatures, like you have to scroll through 39 pages of students that agree with these demands and that have either experienced a lack of care or know people in the community who have experienced and suffered from this lack of care.
[Kelly]: As Fallon points out, while it is troubling to see such a large quantity of students having experienced a lack of care from Columbia mental health services, this shortcoming represents an opportunity for the Columbia community to stand together in support of one another.
As previously mentioned, this support can materialize in a variety of forms. It can be small, as in taking time for a genuine conversation with a friend, to really listen to and hear what they have to say. Or it can be larger, such as with Fallon’s petition. Support can also involve creating platforms for students to share their experiences and facilitating conversations, as described by Cirne with Nightline and Sales with Active Minds. But regardless, the need for support is evident.
[Tess]: All it takes is really one person to say it in a public way. And clearly, everyone else also says it too.
[Kelly]: Thank you for listening to Pod-Tone 292. This episode was reported by me, Kelly Warner. The script was edited by Claire Schnatterbeck and the audio was produced by Matthew Schwitzer. The original music in this episode was composed by Christina Li. Follow us on Instagram at @Spectatorpodcasts and subscribe to The Ear on Spotify to get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find old episodes with full transcripts at columbiaspectator.com/podcasts.
