Helping Students Manage Their Mental Health

Kory Floyd:

Welcome to The Communication Corner, a McGraw-Hill podcast for the communication Discipline. I'm your moderator for this session, Kory Floyd. And today I've brought together two guests to share some insights and strategies for supporting students' mental health. We'll start with some brief introductions and then we'll dive right into today's topic. As I mentioned, I'm Kory Floyd, a Professor of Communication at the University of Arizona. I'm also a McGraw-Hill author and a licensed mental health counselor. Before we get into our topic, I'd like to ask each of my guests to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about their background.

Let's begin with Jody Koenig Kellas from the University of Nebraska.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Hi everybody. I'm Jody Koenig Kellas, as Kory said, and I'm really delighted to be here. I think this is such an important topic, so thanks for having me. I'm Willa Cather Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I have been on the faculty for 20 years and where I run a research lab called Narrative Nebraska, which examines the links between the quality of our communication and the quality of our lives. Specifically the links between storytelling and well-being, and this is something I've been doing for the last 27 years. I've been teaching for 27 years at the college level and teach courses and do research on interpersonal family and health communication.

Kory Floyd:

Thank you, Jody. 20 years at Nebraska, really?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

I know. Can you believe it?

Kory Floyd:

Amazing. Our next guest today is Colter Ray from the University of Tampa.

Colter Ray:

Hi everyone. My name is Colter Ray, and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa. I have been there for two years, but before that was a professor at San Diego State University and Louisiana State University. I study how people mess up communicating after a cancer diagnosis, and so that oftentimes looks at whenever people are trying to be emotionally supportive and they try to say things that are helpful and they end up being hurtful instead. So my goal as a researcher is to improve the communication between cancer patients and their loved ones as they navigate that journey. More recently, I have begun researching loneliness and the various ways that people try to address feelings of loneliness that are both successful and unsuccessful. And this is my 13th year of teaching at the college level. If you count all my graduate student teaching days.

Kory Floyd:

Which of course we do.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Exactly.

Kory Floyd:

Well, I'm so delighted to have you both. I think it's a really nice combination of guests today because we all, in one way or another, want to understand how communication can be used to address wellness and wellbeing. And as college instructors, I didn't do the math to see how many years we collectively have been teaching college. I imagine that in that time during our experiences and certainly during the experiences of those who are listening today, we have seen some trends in mental health challenges that are faced by students. And so I thought we might just begin there.

And Jody, if it's okay, I'd like to toss this question to you first. What do you see in your own experience as some of the most common mental health challenges that are faced by the students that you interact with?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I just did the math at 71 years of combined college experience for-

Kory Floyd:

My goodness, no wonder I'm going gray.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

No, this is an excellent question. It's actually really timely too because as a department chair for the last four years, I've really had to step out of undergraduate teaching until this year. So now I'm back in the undergraduate classroom, and of course I teach graduate students too. But since the pandemic, the last time I taught this class was in fall 2019, I've just seen incredible differences both in my students with whom I'm interacting every day, but also were reports from my faculty about the struggles that students are seeing. So more than ever, I'm seeing a lot of anxiety, depression, loneliness, lack of belonging. I have about 50 or 60 freshmen in my class of a class of 90, and I think a lot of them are just struggling to get to know other people. And fit in, find that sense of belonging.

And the other thing I've noticed, and this is a real benefit, is increased diagnoses of mental health conditions. So students are much more likely to be registered with our Services for Students with Disabilities office, our SSD office. They are much more likely to understand the nature of their mental illness, whether that be depression, anxiety, or if they've identified that they have ADHD or they're on the autism spectrum. So that's something that I've noticed. And then also, in this current climate, just a sense of fear and hopelessness and general stress. I pulled my students the other day just about how they were doing on a eye clicker poll, and I would say 85% of them reported being stressed, fearful, tired, down.

Kory Floyd:

It's interesting that you bring up increases in diagnoses and increases in availing oneself of services. I wonder what you might attribute that to. Do you think the stigma of seeking those kinds of services is abating? Do you think that the availability of the services and advertisement that they're available is increasing? What's your take on that positive upswing that you mentioned?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I think a couple of the things you mentioned are part of it. So one, I think that the stigma has definitely decreased. I think this generation of students is much less worried about talking about their mental health diagnoses or even their feelings of anxiety and depression, even if they're not formally diagnosed. And I think that after the pandemic, universities, at least mine, have really seen the mental health crisis that we're facing and have really tried to respond and so that they're making the services much more organized, targeted for specific student needs, and then also making sure to advertise them well. And then of course, I think social media plays a role in the heightened identification of diagnoses so that there's a lot of communities online, TikTok, Instagram, wherever students are digesting their social media that talk about these various diagnoses and also how to get diagnoses, including self-diagnoses. And so yeah, I really do think it's those three things. I think it's less taboo. I think that universities have tried to respond and advertise, and students are seeing a lot more talk about this on social media.

Kory Floyd:

Right. Right. So Jody and I both teach at large state universities, and Colter in contrast is at a small private school. I wonder, Colter, what sorts of issues do you tend to see? Are they similar? Do you see different kinds of mental health struggles on your own campus? What's the scoop there in Tampa?

Colter Ray:

Yeah, I have I guess, unique perspective having taught at large state schools and now a small or medium-sized private university. And honestly, I would say in terms of the nature of the stressors and the specific struggles students are facing, there's not a huge difference across the board there. I think I would obviously echo almost everything that Jody just said. I think that the college experience, especially for freshmen, can be stressful as they go through that transition. But as students settle in and they start finding hopefully a place of belonging on campus, what we often forget about as professors are all the external factors. And so if you are showing up to class early and as you're setting up, if you're listening to the conversations that students are having with one another, that's a great peek into what is on their minds and what is stressing them out.

It's external factors like money or family issues, relationship issues. And so, it is a lot of that spillover stress where an incompassionate professor might think, why are these students just not doing the work? Why are they turning things in late or not turning into something at all? And if you just take a moment to dig just even a little deeper into their lives through conversations or check ins with them, you'll be quickly reminded of how, just how much they have going on in their life, right? They're balancing one or two jobs, they might be taking care of a sick parent, they might be going through their first heartbreak. And all these things are compounding on top of the baseline stress of doing well in a class. And so I think that that's essentially what's happening or what I see most frequently.

And you're right though, Jody, that I think that this generation is much more attuned to their mental health than previous generations. And as a result, our counseling services are being used to the point where now we face a capacity issue where it's like we are needing to expand, so that everyone can get the resources that they need.

Kory Floyd:

It's almost as if, Colter, we forget that our students are whole individuals.

Colter Ray:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Kory Floyd:

And not just college students, right?

Colter Ray:

Yeah.

Kory Floyd:

In the same way that we are as faculty, whole individuals who have families and stressors and a variety of life experiences that we bring into the classroom with us every day. Colter, keeping with that theme, I wonder then, how do you start to notice that a student may actually be struggling, not just with everyday stressors, we all have those, but really with their mental well-being, what do you think some of the warning signs are that we as faculty ought to be attuned to?

Colter Ray:

Yeah, I think the important part here, because it might be different from person to person. So my personal approach to this is at the start of the semester, immediately trying to create some level of connection with every student in my classes. So by the end of the first day, I'm going to know their names, because I've already tried to memorize them before and I'm going to send out an email individually to every single student, just welcoming them to class, maybe commenting on something they said during the first opening day activities, things like that. But what that does is it establishes a baseline and it gives you a sense of how much is this student expressing their thoughts and their emotions, and how engaged are they? And how motivated are they?

And then that is so helpful in a few different ways. One, it just does wonders for the classroom environment moving forward the rest of the semester, but on an individual level, you now have a sense of where the student is at the time, whenever they are probably most fresh. In the sense of they come into the new semester and we're all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, and we're optimistic, for the most part, about how the semester is going to go. And so you can start to see throughout the semester, then whenever students start maybe missing class more often or whenever they start withdrawing from class activities and also just changes in their demeanor as well. And so I think that's why it's so important to start off as a professor, really spending that first week, not only getting them acquainted to the course, but getting acquainted with them as human beings so that you have that baseline to work off of the rest of the semester in case you do start to notice that they're missing things, forgetting to turn things in, or I should say, not turning things in and things that just seem out of the norm for them. And that might be the first warning sign.

Kory Floyd:

Jody, what are your thoughts?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, well, I love what you do, Colter. That is such a good idea. I love the idea of sending individualized emails to them. I do something similar, so just along the same lines of getting to know your students early on to set a baseline. I do something called narrative pedagogy. Aaron Wheeler and I have a chapter on this in the Handbook for Instructional Communication, but it's a practice that we've been doing for the last, I want to say 12 or more years with our students where we have them make appointments with us and come in during the first month of class. And we sit with them and say, "I'll be your professor, therefore there's a great deal. I need to know about your education and your life. Tell me what you think I need to know about your situation." This is adapted from the Practices of Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon and her colleagues at Columbia.

And so we have students just talk to us for five minutes. We time undergraduate students, they don't like to have to talk for more than five minutes, but we just let them talk for five minutes about whatever they think we should know. And we don't put any guide rails around it. We tell them, this is not a therapy appointment, you don't have to share anything personal, but we just let them share what they want to. And what happens is, one, they're incredibly surprised that a professor wants to know about them. And then two, they you information that makes them unique individuals in your class so that when you go back to class, you now have 30 or 20 or however many students facing you who as unique human beings. And after they're done talking, I let them ask me questions, and then I type up a narrative of what they told me using their words as much as I can, and I share that with them. So it becomes part of our class record, and it's a way to build affiliation between me and the student, and it's also really gives me a good sense of who they are and why they might be behaving the way that they are.

So one semester, for example, I had a student who, it was a really small class. It was about 15 students and we sat in a horseshoe and he never sat inside the horseshoe. He always sat with his back to the wall away from all of the other students. And I was getting concerned about that. And during the narrative pedagogy appointment, he let me know that he had been in the military and had some PTSD and that it was really important for him to at all times be able to see the door and also have nothing at his back. And so that it wasn't, he wasn't an engaged student, but that he needed to position himself in that way to feel safe.

And so those kinds of appointments reveal so much about students and then they make them feel connected to you. So that way, hopefully, in addition to what Colter said, we're doing things like watching for exactly what he said, withdrawal from class, missing class, not turning things in. But we are also able to see how their behavior might differ from how you know them in a better sense. And then I also watched for their level of sensitivity, their behavior in class. I had a student who really teared up the other day and that led me to know that I better pull her aside and make sure she was okay and connect her with services if she needed it.

Kory Floyd:

What I love about what both of you said is the importance, really underlining the importance of establishing a baseline. Because of course, 99 times out of 100, these students are coming into our classes and we don't know them. This is our first introduction to them as human beings. So it's so difficult to appreciate when there are changes in mood or changes in sensitivity, as Jody talked about, changes in behavior. If we don't know what's normative for those students. And as Jody pointed out, that's going to vary a lot depending on their individual life experiences. But that's such that the cornerstone of noticing a warning sign that a student may be struggling with mental health is that we are seeing changes in their normal way of being. And so understanding their normal way of being is really important to be able to that.

I wonder if we could just speculate for a minute. I imagine there are people listening today who think, I wish I could write to every single student. I wish I could invite every single student in, but I teach a class of 150, 250 students in maybe introduction to communication. If the kinds of techniques that you both employ are not options for an instructor, what do you think are some other things that an instructor could do to at least get a foothold on being able to watch for warning signs of mental challenges?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, sorry, just so glad you asked that. I'll be quick, Colter, but I just wanted to say, I was going to say this. So my class actually this semester is 90 students, so I cannot do the one-on-one meetings with everybody. It's just not possible. And so the alternative is that we put them into small groups in those big classes from the get-go, and we have them do the narrative pedagogy with each other so that they ask each other to tell each other stories, and sit in a circle and they write for the person to their left. So that everybody in the group is getting to know each other. We have them exchange contact information, and then we have them sit together during this semester and do regular activities in class so that they also can keep an eye on each other. And that way, and then we talk explicitly about mental health in class so that to make it a comfortable thing, but if someone is missing regularly, then we as the instructors can say, "Hey, have you seen so-and-so?" Or, "Is everybody in your group here?" And so I think that that's one way with large classes that we can help facilitate belonging and connection, but also to get a sense of accountability for one another as people.

Colter Ray:

Yeah, Jody, I mean, you pretty much said exactly what I would want to echo or say as well. The other thing too, and I don't know if this is cheating or not, but you can also, in a large class of 120 students, set up a form emailer through, or what is it called? A mail merge through Microsoft Word, where pretty quickly if you set it up, you can send it out and it looks like everyone's receiving their own personalized email. The message would be the same, but it would at least be addressed to them by their first name. And you might be able to change up some things a little bit. I think the largest class I've taught on record was 120. And I think I used that method to still send what looked like a personalized email. And I think some students bought it and some probably saw right through it.

But what I still did is I still made a concerted effort to try to get to know as many students by name in that class. And I was used to 40 or 50 person classes, which I was able to get everyone's names down. So even learning 40 or 50 students names in a large class starts to give the illusion that all 120 or 200 students names. And so that's just something... I guess, I say all that because I don't want people to think just because you're teaching over a hundred students that you can't still at least try to create that sense of individual connection.

Kory Floyd:

Jody, I love the fact that you talked about that peer support. And one of the things that I have seen in working with students who are struggling with their mental health and in treating them is that often they look to each other as gauges for their own wellness. When it comes to the point at which they're trying to decide for themselves, is this just my normal stress, is this just me dealing with the normal stresses and strains in my life, or am I really struggling with something beyond that? That could be an anxiety disorder or symptoms of depression. They often use their peers as a gauge to figure out really their own level of wellness. And so to begin that discussion early in a class, early in a new semester with students to get them used to talking about that and sharing about that I think is so valuable. You mentioned before Jody a potential role of social media in affecting students' mental health, either positively or negatively or both. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I mean, I have two teenagers myself, so I actually think about this quite a bit. One who is a college freshman and one who is 15. But I mean, I think social media certainly plays a role in mental health. I was lucky enough to go to a lecture on my campus last year or the year before, given by a researcher named Jean Twenge who wrote a book called Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, and What They Mean for America's Future. And she talked about the fact that for both 12 to 17 year olds and 18 to 25 year olds over the last decade, major depressive episodes have more than doubled.

And one of the things that she made sense of in her research was that these rates have doubled since 2012, and that's when most people in the US owned by then a smartphone. So smartphones were developed in 2007, and by 2012, most everybody had one. So it may be that there is a link between smartphone usage and increase in depressive episodes, loneliness, anxiety.

And we don't know the research that she was reporting on doesn't tell us why, but she reasoned that one of the things is that students these days spend about 4.8 hours per day on social media. And so what were those four-point hours going toward before social media? They were probably going toward things like sleep, time by oneself, downtime, mindfulness, and interaction with other people. So interpersonal communication with others. And so it may just be that certainly social media is not all bad. And I try to tell my students that. There are many benefits like the self diagnoses and or finding a community to get you to mental health professionals so that you can get a formal diagnosis, finding community on social media, connection, belonging, especially when you feel isolated. And so those things can be really helpful. But I do think that it's important for us to think too, how is the time we spend on social media taking away from other healthful things like sleep, exercise and hanging out with friends?

Kory Floyd:

I just wonder where are they fine, four and a half hours a day.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

It's at night when they should be sleeping.

Kory Floyd:

And you're probably very right that they are taking that time away from other potentially beneficial activities. Colter, what are you seeing or what would you speculate about how using social media influences students' mental health in either good or bad ways or potentially both?

Colter Ray:

Yeah, I would say the negative outweighs the positive. I think most people would say that. Even just something that I saw in the past day was, I think it was an article on Fortune that said 50% of Gen Z wished that TikTok exist. And so I think that's interesting because it shows similar to what we were talking about earlier, that this generation has a higher level of awareness about their mental health. And I think that the fact that half of them wish it didn't exist shows that they realize this is something that I might be addicted to or that is just taking up too much time, and I wish that it wasn't a thing, but at the same time, I'm going to continue to use it because it's part of the fabric of how I interact with other people in generation. Or they bring up these funny TikToks or certain videos whenever we hang out in person. And if I'm not on that platform, I don't know what they're talking about, I feel excluded. So I think that's part of it.

And then I think the other part, and I've thought this for years, and I'm not the only one to think this is that it is the perfect mechanism for engaging in unhealthy upward comparisons to other people who I think are my peers because they are the same age as me, but realistically, it's just people who have much potentially more extravagant lives in them. So you hop on Instagram or TikTok and all you see are people who are beautiful, who are somehow always in Mykonos or somewhere in the Mediterranean and they're at some resorts and they're having a great time eating charcuterie in the middle of a infinity pool or whatever it is.

And they think, why can't my life be like that? Or I'm so unlucky that my life isn't that. And it's not realistic. I don't know a single person who has eaten charcuterie and infinity pool in my personal life, but I see it all the time on social media. And so it's easy to start thinking like, oh, everyone else is having more fun than me, everyone is cooler than me, everyone's better looking than me. And it just warps our general perception of what day-to-day life is. And that can create that anxiety, that loneliness, feelings of inferiority and all these other issues that go together.

Kory Floyd:

Right. Right. I was just racking my brain to see if I could remember any pictures of you and infinity pool, but none come to mind at the moment.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

I was thinking about a lot of beautiful social media posts from your honeymoon, Colter.

Colter Ray:

But it wasn't an infinity pool.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

It's true.

Colter Ray:

So it doesn't count.

Kory Floyd:

I think there was charcuterie involved though, but.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

I was comparing myself to you when I saw those posts.

Kory Floyd:

Yes, we all were.

Colter Ray:

And don't do that. That's unhealthy. Think about your own great experiences that you've had in life and treasure those and be grateful for them and realize that most people who are posting those things are probably paid to do it and they're not the norm.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Well, and even if you think about Snapchat, which is so popular right now, there's location services on Snapchat. So the other thing that can happen is that young people can see where their friends are based on the Snap Map, and then they know when they're not with them. They know when they haven't been invited and when other people might be off doing something together. And that can really create a lot of stress and feelings of rejection.

Colter Ray:

As a non-Snapchat user, that just angers me so much that feature exists. I mean, I get the idea of find your friends for safety. But just what benefits do people get out of that? It just provokes the same of exclusion or things like that. That's my initial take on hearing that.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah.

Kory Floyd:

So it sounds like we're collectively agreed that the negative outweighs the positive, but I wonder if we could speculate a little more about what are the positives. Jody mentioned the ability to look for information about one's condition, one's symptoms, maybe going down the road of a self-diagnosis, but what are some other ways that you think social media has actually been a boon to mental health rather than a detriment?

Colter Ray:

I think about people who are parts of minority populations or who maybe just have something about them that they feel internally that makes them weird or different or lesser than, and they might actually be able to find, through social media, that they are not the only people who are feeling that way or who have those thoughts or those emotions. And it can actually maybe show them that... I also especially think this in terms of people who are in small rural communities who may only have a thousand people who they might interact with in their town, like a town of a thousand people, and maybe there's no one else in that community who might feel that way, so it gives them this outlet to connect with people from across the world who can say, look, I'm going through this same thing as well. So that's what comes to mind as a positive right away.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I think those are great mean. I think also just a sense of, this goes back to what I was saying before, but I think it can be a sense of relief when you hear other people talking about the way that you've been feeling to know that you are not the only one. You had mentioned that earlier, Kory, with the students in the class, they look to each other to see what their baseline is and to see how they should be feeling or thinking and when they've been feeling bad or marginalized or isolated, and they can find other people online who are feeling the same way. And not only feel a sense of relief that they're not the only ones, but also hear from people that have maybe been dealing with whatever they're dealing with for a lot longer of a time, may have ideas for support services or techniques or strategies for feeling better. And also, let's face it, there are some really funny things on social media. So that they can bring us, looking at TikToks together and cracking up is a way to connect with other people, both online and in your personal life. So it's certainly not all bad. It's just like most things right now, we are not handling it in moderation, and I think it would be better if we did.

Colter Ray:

Yeah, Jody, that's a really good point. I think about a lot of my friends who I no longer live near. And yeah, I call them occasionally. I'm actually pretty bad about calling people, but almost every day there's about 10 people that I send at least one Instagram reel to them, and the expectation is that they will probably watch it at some point in the next 24 hours and probably just even give it a thumbs up or a heart reply or something like that. But we just send to each other these things throughout the day, and it's just the equivalent of a micro moment of shared experience with one another. What you're saying is here's something that is just as silly as I know your sense of humor is, and I found it funny. And here's a little gift to you. Take 15 seconds out of your day to watch this one little video about a cat that meows like a human talks or something, whatever it is.

So yeah, I think that's probably the most positive way I personally use social media now that I reflect on it, is just that informal background, asynchronous communication.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

I feel like we should, as communication scholars, also mentioned that there's a ton of research on this. I think Colter and I just don't happen to be people, or Kory, that research this heavily, but there is a lot of research in our field about the importance of both, not only strong ties or people with whom you have a close personal relationship, but also your weak ties. So those people with whom you're connected on social media, who you might, for example, just in the realm of social support, seek, I'm thinking about Andy High's work, but seek support from instrumental support or informational support. That can be helpful, and it's convenient and it's efficient. And so social media has allowed us to have a much wider group of weak ties than we used to be able to have.

Kory Floyd:

That's such a good point, because those weak ties in so many cases far outnumber the strong ties.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Right.

Kory Floyd:

And that's in many ways an untapped source of support for many people. Think about how many people you might be connected with on social media who you don't see more than once a month or once a year, and yet can still be people you can reach out to have a conversation with, often pick up where you left off and feel that sense of continuity in those relationships that we wouldn't have the ability to do without something like social media.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Right.

Kory Floyd:

I wonder if we could talk for a moment about the resources that are available on your campuses for supporting students' mental wellbeing. And I think my question is less about what those resources are, and more about how faculty and staff even play a role in helping to connect students to those resources. What can we do as people who interact with students to help make that connection when we feel like it is needed? Colter, would you like to begin with that one?

Colter Ray:

Sure. University of Tampa right now is going through their re-accreditation process, and part of that is what's called a QEP or Quality Enhancement Plan. And actually our university's QEP this time around is to build a community of care on campus. And so what we have found is so many students are using psychology or counseling services, and so many of our faculty members, as soon as they find out a student might be struggling, they just by default don't want it to typically want to deal with it personally, and they just recommend that they go to psychological or counseling services. What we're trying to actually do on campus right now is to shift that conversation and give people the communication skills and tools, faculty members included, to have conversations with students about what they can do that are positive coping mechanisms or maybe what are some negative coping mechanisms doing that they should stop doing.

And on top of that, we are also going to be training, I believe, over a hundred of our students to be peer mentors or peer coaches who are paired up with new students, typically freshmen, and check in with them. And that actually ties back to what Jody was talking about with that peer check-in that often happens because we look to our peers to see if this is a normal amount of stress or if I'm starting to experience some distress here. So that's what we have going on here.

And I think what that means for faculty members and administrators and staff is that the first step is to become comfortable having the conversation instead of just wanting to immediately push someone off into counseling services.

Kory Floyd:

And that's a big ask for some people.

Colter Ray:

For sure.

Kory Floyd:

I think mental health is one of those issues that makes many people uncomfortable to think about, let alone to talk to someone about, and we don't necessarily know what we're getting into when we open up a conversation like that. So it's understandable why some faculty and staff might shy away from that. I think that normalizing those conversations can go a long way. And it sounds like that's part of what your school's trying to do now. Jody, what are your thoughts?

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I mean, I have had to come to know a lot about the resources on our campus as the department chair. And so as I mentioned before, I think since COVID, there's been a lot of collective effort to organize and make clear the different services that are available. I know UNL is developing a well-being collective, and they've really drilled down on the ways in which we make referral to student services so that there's an Office of Student Advocacy, an Office of Academic Navigators, and then our counseling and psychological services. So based on the issue that the student is having, there are different resources, and now really easy ways to direct them in those.

But you asked about what can we do as faculty to help respond to student needs? One of the things that we've done on a structural level is, for my department, we have a department web page that's just for us. So we actually go through our learning management system. It's on Canvas. And we have a department Canvas page. And so on that page, I have the link to that student referral page so that it's really at the fingertips of our faculty and our GTAs. So if they have a student come into their office and they need help or they need a referral, all of that is right there because I think in the past, what's been hard is, "Oh, which office am I supposed to send them to? And where's that number?" So part of what I think we can do as faculty is have all of that at the ready.

I'm so lucky because I have a faculty member who, Dr. Allison Bonander, she put together a whole module on well-being resources for us for our Canvas page. And it has a tab that lists every single mental well-being resource on our campus and descriptions and links to those, all the physical resources that are on campus. So things like for food, clothing, transportation, healthcare. So we have something called Husker Pantry. So we can direct students who might be needing food or supplies and that they have food and or shelter insecurity, they can go there. There's a link to the Title IX office and all the resources that are available there and how to report anything, how to anonymously report. And then we have a tab on diversity and inclusion. And that includes links to all student associations and all offices on our campus that provide support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And so I think that one thing we can do is make ourselves as informed as possible because as you said, Kory, some faculty are much more comfortable being the listener, being the person who is willing to sit in the office and listen to someone. And other people are really reticent to do that, either for fear of making things worse or because they don't have that training.

And so I think part of our responsibility is to just familiarize ourselves with these offices so that we can then direct our students easily and without any stigma. And I think we also need to be willing to walk them over. I think we need to be willing to, or find someone who will, because students, I think it's always better to have somebody leave an office having called with them or offered to walk with them if they want to go, rather than just giving them the information. And that might be something that others aren't comfortable with, but that's a strategy that I've used many times. I've called counseling and psychological services with a student, or I've offered to walk with them or walk downstairs to the SSD office.

Kory Floyd:

Right. Right. And on a large college campus like you work on, I think that that's even more important because students may not even know where those resources are located.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Exactly.

Kory Floyd:

Yeah. Well listen, as we bring our discussion today to a close, I know that some of the instructors who are listening today have probably engaged with students who are struggling with their own mental health. And I wonder if each of you could just offer one piece of advice, and it may pick up on something that you've already mentioned in the podcast, and that's fine, but one piece of advice that a listener could implement to better support their own students. And Jody, let's begin with you.

Jody Koenig Kellas:

Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked about so many of them, but I would say the things that we've already said is to familiarize yourself with the resources. And then I think maybe the most important thing is to listen and realize that you might be the person, particularly given what we teach, and communication scholars and teachers are very attuned to our students' behavior a lot of times. And I think recognizing that you might be the person who reaching out could make a significant and tremendous difference. I think it's really important that we know our role and that of course, we set boundaries and that we let professionals do the work of providing mental health services for our students. But there is a lot that is incredibly powerful about just being the person who asks, "Hey, is everything okay?" Or, "Hey, I've noticed that you haven't been to class lately. I wanted to check in to make sure everything's going okay. I am here if you need to talk and to help connect you with resources on campus."

And I can't tell you how many times I've done that. This semester we're in week six, and I have worked with several students to try to connect them with services to just be that person that might make a difference when they're feeling alone and scared away from home and needing of support.

And then I think lastly, I'll say to also in this moment, I'm hearing a lot from my faculty that providing support for students' mental health is also very difficult for faculty because they worry about the students. And so I think it's really important for faculty to get support for their own mental health as well.

Kory Floyd:

That's such a good observation. Yeah. We're all in this together, and these things can take a toll on all of us, faculty and students alike. Colter, your advice?

Colter Ray:

Yeah. Mine would be that remember that a large portion of Generation Z and college students are experiencing some level of loneliness. And loneliness, of course is tied to things like anxiety and stress and depression and other mental and physical health issues. And so in remembering that, realize that your classroom for some of your students might be the only chance that they have in their life to really have meaningful interactions with peers or with other people. And so try to find a way to the extent possible to make your classroom an opportunity for students to not only learn the material that you want them to learn, but that they have adequate time to form new relationships, new friendships with the people that they're in class with. So if you are debating between doing another activity or lecturing for another 10 minutes, do the activity. If you notice that students are mostly done discussing whatever you want them to discuss, and now they're talking about their weekend plans, let that discussion go for like 60 more seconds before you cut it off and bring it back to whatever you're lecturing on. Just I think that the more I do this, the more I realize that that's what students are craving is not only knowledge about the subject, but also a chance to have in-person connections with each other.

Kory Floyd:

And you're right, that may be one of the only spaces where they experience that. Yeah, that's great advice. Well, first and foremost, I'd like to thank both of my wonderful guest today, Jody Kellas, Colter Ray, I really appreciate your insights, your experiences.

And for those listening today, thank you so much for joining us. We hope that you have learned something new that might help you support your students' mental health and wellness. We really appreciate you being with us today, and please tune in for the next episode of Communication Corner.