Spiritual and Mental Health in Higher Education Banner 1200 x 400

Supported by the Ruderman Family Foundation

Summary

The mental health needs of young people are at crisis level. The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated this. Colleges and universities have expanded mental health support  for students and are exploring new models to alleviate distress and promote the whole-person wellness of students.

Using a groundbreaking protocol developed at and licensed by Mass General Brigham McLean Hospital, this project will significantly enhance the mental health support offered on college campuses by partnering mental health providers and spiritual care providers for facilitated student support groups. This successful  intervention was tested in an earlier pilot project supported by the Ruderman Family Foundation. This project will train up to 33 teams per year from participating Massachusetts institutions of higher education to offer these groups on their own campuses. We will do this work over a period of two years with a team composed from the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, Brandeis University, and mental health professionals/chaplain pairs from institutions selected from an applicant pool of interested Massachusetts schools.

Outcomes

The project will achieve three goals:

1. Strengthen professional collaboration between spiritual care and mental healthcare providers on college campuses and build capacity for their continued collaborations to address student mental health;

2. Extend the preventative resources available to students on campus, which are often less robust than the resources available to respond to student mental health issues; and

3. Significantly raise the profile of spiritual care resources on college campuses, which are often underutilized, under-resourced, and prepared to serve all students regardless of religious and spiritual background, including none.

Participating institutions will have significant latitude in structuring group offerings on their own campuses. The core characteristics of the intervention are that it is 1) a group intervention; 2) it takes place over some time frame longer than a handful of meetings; 3) it is facilitated jointly and simultaneously by a mental health care provider and a spiritual care provider; 4) the facilitators use the materials provided during training for the protocol.

You may also be interested in the pilot iteration of this project, also sponsored by the Ruderman Family Foundation and conducted in partnership with Northeastern University.