Centre strengthens mental health support programs, becomes first JED Campus in Kentucky
Centre College has partnered with The JED Foundation to add to its student counseling options, becoming the first JED Campus in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
JED Campus is a nationwide initiative of The JED Foundation designed to help schools evaluate and strengthen their prevention programs and systems related to mental health, substance misuse and suicide to ensure that schools have the strongest possible mental health safety nets. Centre was awarded a Morgan Stanley Financial Aid Scholarship to help facilitate the four-year partnership. This grant, combined with one from the Freed Foundation last fall, fulfills the College’s portion of the commitment.
In the past decade, Centre has committed to improving its student counseling options, from increasing the number of counselors to four to now adding a partnership with JED, allowing the College to expand its mental health strategies beyond the counseling office to better aid its students.
“This increase in staffing is consistent with trends across the country as more and more college students seek support for their mental health,” said Director of Centre Counseling Ann Goodwin. “As mental health issues facing college students have become more complex and stigma associated with mental health has decreased, we are also recognizing that to truly impact student well-being in the way we aspire to, we need this to be a campus wide effort, including making some cultural changes. The JED Foundation is the expert in the field of college campus mental health. This program has been on the Centre Counseling ‘wish list’ for several years. We recognize the potential impact of having the JED experts come in to help us assess our strengths and areas for improvement in order to improve student support at Centre and to increasingly become a campus that prioritizes student wellness.”
The prioritization of students comes at an important time, between the COVID-19 pandemic and high-profile cases of racially driven violence.
“Many in our country and across the world have experienced losses, including our college-aged students who are facing the typical stresses of college compounded by these circumstances,” Goodwin said. “The entire campus community will benefit from the role that the JED Campus program will play. President Moreland and members of senior staff support this initiative to begin a thorough assessment of how our students are doing and how we can better support them. This will be a comprehensive and creative response to our students’ needs.”
JED Campus arrives this fall and will be actively involved on campus for the next four years. Goodwin said she’s hopeful that four years will be impactful for the long-term development of Centre’s wellness services.
“The college years are the age when many mental health issues first manifest, and it can be a time of significant stress and pressure,” said John MacPhee, executive director of the program. “JED Campus helps schools by working with them to survey everything their university is doing to support their students’ emotional health and find practical ways to augment these efforts in a comprehensive way. We believe that the implementation of a campus-wide approach to mental health will lead to safer, healthier communities and likely greater student retention.”
JED Campus is considered one of the premier options for student mental health for its campus-wide approach.
“JED has developed the ‘Model for Comprehensive Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention for College Campuses,’ which was reviewed by multiple mental health and higher education experts and is in the best practice registry,” Goodwin said. “It includes seven priorities for students that include developing life skills, promoting connectedness, identifying students at risk, increasing help-seeking behavior, providing mental health, substance and crisis services, following crisis management procedures and restricting access to lethal means.”
Students can get involved right away this fall, through feedback during an assessment process, Goodwin said. All students will be invited to participate in a Healthy Minds Survey, and responses to those surveys will be essential in the success of JED Campus.
“Once we have completed the assessment, as with all Centre College endeavors, students will be central to the implementation process,” Goodwin said. “We don’t know what that will look like yet, but it will, in the spirit of campus culture, be student centric. Centre Counseling already has a student mental health advisory board, and if students are interested in being involved with this student board, they should email michael.spears@centre.edu.”
For more information about JED Campus, visit www.jedcampus.org.
