A survey by Boynton researchers reveals no evidence for worsened mental health for Black students in the early weeks of the pandemic.
By Jonas Dominguez
One year ago, the University of Minnesota shut down in-person classes and moved most classes online, creating a major housing and financial transition for students as they moved home or faced difficult financial situations.
To gauge how this affected student mental health, Boynton Health surveyed students and found over half reported experiencing moderate to very stressful everyday lives because of the pandemic.
How did Black students fare? The sample size was too small to provide any insight.
“The challenge is always with not having a sufficient number of BIPOC students to be able to adequately generalize to the population,” said Dr. Katie Lust, who led the survey between April 21 and May 5 of last year.
Even though the survey could not capture sufficient data on this group, Boynton staff remain concerned about the mental health of Black students in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent social unrest. Much of this is related to healthcare structures that historically have not supported Black students or helped them gain access to resources.
While the share of student respondents in the April survey who identified as BIPOC was not low, it is the small share of Black students that makes interpreting results more difficult. A total of 2,067 student responses were recorded, with approximately 24% of those responses coming from students who identified as BIPOC. Lust said only approximately 50 of those respondents self-identified as Black – too few to make meaningful generalizations or interpretations.
Despite this, some mental health professionals on campus know that a lack of access to resources in the early weeks of the pandemic — and an ongoing need for them throughout — is a reality that many Black students and other students of color experience and continue to live with.
Alex Montes, a mental health provider who has been working at Boynton for about two years, works with many students of color at the University and is the co-leader of a therapy group at Boynton designed to serve mixed and multiracial students, called Mixed/Multiracial Connections.
In the summer of 2020, a season when the mental health service usually sees a downturn in students seeking or receiving counseling, Montes says she was booked full. While she cannot speculate as to if there was a statistically significant rise in students of color seeking treatment during this time, she believes the increase was because students were able to connect to sessions remotely, which Boynton was allowed to do because of the pandemic.
“Anecdotally I believe being booked to be related more to [the] accessibility of therapy to be brought to folks’ homes through telehealth rather than having to commute to campus for a session,” Montes said in an email.
Yet for many students, this avenue of help may also be closed off. Despite Gov. Tim Walz’s April 2020 order allowing students living outside Minnesota to receive counseling at Boynton through the telehealth format, the COVID-19 mental health survey found only 4.1% of approximately 50 Black respondents reported seeing a mental health provider in that way.
But while this figure looks low, the extremely small number of respondents once again makes generalization impossible, according to Lust. In other words, there is no evidence that Black students fared better or worse than their white counterparts during the early weeks of quarantine.
One thing that’s certain, however, is that historically, Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color have faced difficulties finding fair mental health care and fair health care in general. One reason is a lack of diversity among healthcare providers, Montes said. It is also the case that many different communities and cultures fall under the BIPOC umbrella, requiring a nuanced approach to health care instead of one strategy for how all of these communities and cultures are treated.
Mental health practitioners especially need to understand the “white standard” of mental health care that pervades the system, Montes said. She quoted Resmaa Menakem, a Minneapolis therapist, trauma specialist and teacher who takes a vested interest in the generational trauma that faces Black and other people of color in society:
“Resmaa has described [the white standard] to be ‘the white body is the supreme standard of humanity’ that all is compared to,” Montes said.
This is the standard that United States culture has been shaped by historically, and that it in turn shapes our medical systems, mental health systems and social systems. Because these systems are not created equitably, mistreatment and mistrust perpetuate when people of color turn to these institutions and witness harm continuing to be done. Frequent minimization and dismissal of pain in BIPOC individuals in medical settings, including health care, are some examples of the historical “white standard,” according to Montes.
“What we do know about our medical system is that it was not designed in considering Black, brown, Indigenous, people of color, in mind,” Montes said. “And so, we could consider that since that is the standard … that when students are coming in that don’t meet this white standard, they are not able to be adequately assessed in the way that’s needed.”