From the Chief Health Officer

At Indiana University, our main focus is on our students, and their success is paramount. Critical to that success is health and wellbeing, and we work every day to create an inclusive and caring educational atmosphere that fosters academic and personal growth. Like other universities, we have observed a growing demand for mental health services on all of our campuses. Nationally, the data show an alarming rise in mental distress on college campuses and a corresponding decline in flourishing. In response to our students’ increased needs, over the years IU has evaluated its mental health and wellness offerings, and has made significant progress toward enhancing its services. But as we reckon with the toll of COVID-19, we must and should do more for our students.

Beginning fall 2021, we were charged with the following to improve the fostering and care of mental health on our various campuses:

• To perform a comprehensive review of all resources, programs, and efforts currently provided on IU’s campuses
• To make specific, pragmatic, and actionable recommendations to the President to improve the ways we support and care for mental health in our students
• To create long-term plans to benchmark and monitor our student’s mental health and make adjustments to our infrastructure as appropriate.

INITIAL STEPS

 Many reports have been generated reviewing our mental health offerings on various campuses and for various constituencies. Therefore, we first performed an audit of mental health services available at each campus (see Appendix 1).

We also met with the directors of CAPS or counseling services on each campus, both individually and in groups, to hear their thoughts as to what is going well, and where we could see improvement. We also surveyed each organization to identify strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions for short- and long-term goals.

We are not the only university to have recognized the need for this action. Many have conducted reviews and set up task forces to review their own mental health offerings. Therefore ,we reviewed various reports from other schools, as well as the American Council on Education’s guidebook on Mental Health Task Forces in Higher Education, which summarized many of them.

 MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES AT IU TODAY

The current provisions of services at IU’s campuses can be found in Appendix 2. These include both the mental health care services provided by CAPS and counseling centers, as well as other services and programs that touch on aspects of mental health.

In order to make these easier to navigate, we have completely redesigned the IU Student Mental Health website. In addition to doing a thorough census of programs and services available on all campuses, we organized these into one area to provide a one-stop-shop for all information.

FRAMEWORK

Some of the key factors to promoting mental health involve helping students to develop life skills, promoting social connectedness, increasing self-help behavior, and providing mental health services and programs. In addition, we need to create a climate where students feel safe and supported, both through culture and specific university policies.

RECOMMENDATIONS

 To accomplish our goals, action will focus on three areas: (1) Culture and Climate, (2) Services and Support, and (3) Policies and Protocols. For each of these areas, we will convene a task force to help implement recommendations across IU’s many campuses (Appendix 3).

Each task force will work through the recommendations with an eye on equity in all aspects and steps of planning and implementation.

Their action plans should identify who at IU will be responsible for implementation, and how success will be measured. When possible, they should include a budget of associated costs and how those costs should be covered. Recognizing that some recommendations will be short-term and some long-term, they should be accompanied by appropriate benchmarks.

They will also be responsible for updating the community as to progress, which will be highlighted on the IU Student Mental Health website.

Aaron Carroll, MD, MS
Chief Health Officer, Indiana University
Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, IU School of Medicine