Walker Byrd, SGA president, recently discussed the developments that are taking place with the Task Force on Student Mental Health on campus to address mental illness at Auburn.
This comes shortly after Branch Acton, senior in social work, wrote to The Plainsman about how he thinks Auburn needs more mental health counselors.
Byrd agreed in his response to the letter, and is now providing information about the task force and what it is looking to do to better the University’s mental illness resources.
Byrd said force’s goal is to have the data collection complete by early December, before Christmas Break.
“We initiated the task force back in August,” Byrd said. “There’s 37 members all across campus: students, faculty, staff, administrators. We’re kind of at the halfway point right now.”
Byrd said they want to identify what long-term needs students will have.
One way the task force is doing this is by having four subcommittees: program assessment, focus groups, faculty education and community-based groups.
“First is program assessment,” Byrd said. “So, that’s taking the programs that are currently available on this campus and assessing the service to the students.”
Byrd said this subcommittee will also assess costs of resources.
The next subcommittee, focus groups, will be responsible for collecting data about mental illness in Auburn and getting feedback, according to Byrd.
Faculty education is the third subcommittee.
“This basically tackles the question, ‘How can we better equip faculty to tackle some of these issues?’” Byrd said. “Especially because they are on the front lines, and they can be the ones to notice or identify an issue in the students.”
The fourth subcommittee, community-based groups, will look at the external resources that can be reached off campus.
“This ranges from medical providers to face-to-face communication and where can students go off campus to seek help,” Byrd said.
Byrd also mentioned survey, which is not a subcommittee, but a part of the task force’s process now so that the group can identify issues and form statistics.
In its current preliminary findings, the task force found some causes of mental illness or stress for college students.
“Academics are one of the leading factors,” Byrd said.
The task force's preliminary findings also indicate that anxiety, depression, suicide, academic failures, lack of communication of resources and fear of failure are key areas of concern.
Although the group is only at the halfway point in this project, Byrd said he is happy with what it's been able to do so far.
“It’s been really awesome, and we’ve made a lot of progress,” Byrd said.
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