Image: Tabitha Grier-Reed is a co-chair of the President’s Initiative for Student Mental Health, or PRISMH, a program intended to research and reimagine student mental health care at the University of Minnesota. (Courtesy of Tabitha Grier-Reed)
The three-year mental health initiative spent two semesters gathering a task force and will now begin to “transform the system,” its leaders say.
By Anna Koenning
In February 2021, President Joan Gabel launched the President’s Initiative for Student Mental Health (PRISMH), a system-wide drive to examine and make recommendations for mental health care and prevention at the University of Minnesota.
The initiative was aimed at addressing the nearly doubling of students at the University who say they have been diagnosed with a mental illness in their lifetimes. According to Boynton’s 2021 student health survey, 51.7% of students reported a mental health diagnosis compared to 27.1% in 2010.
Co-chairs Tabitha Grier-Reed and Maggie Towle have now organized the PRISMH task force of 60 people to discuss potential actions. Among the task force topics are allyship and early detection, prevention, services, treatment and research.
Grier-Reed said that the problem with mental health care is not so much erasing stigma for students to seek help, as it was in the past, but rather keeping up with students’ needs.
“When I was being trained, so much of the training was about destigmatizing care,” she said. “I will say that that’s still a challenge, but I feel like what’s become even more challenging is meeting the demands and the needs of students.”
Grier-Reed said the initiative is using a public health model, meaning that everybody on campus from students to professors to administrators should be engaged in supporting mental health needs. The model focuses on preventative measures, like stress management, rather than reactive actions, like crisis response, to tackle mental health.
“We’ve been charged with transforming the system, so when you transform the system, theoretically everyone is impacted,” Greer-Reed said. “I do think that PRISMH is about systemic change.”
Gabel allocated $100,000 in non-recurring funds to PRISMH. For context, the University spent $22,988,232 on athletic coaching salaries in 2021.
The initiative was launched via emails to recruit task force members and to introduce an expansive website featuring stories about students’ challenges and mental health resources. The site now includes updates on the task force’s progress since August of 2021.
Progress for PRISMH has been incremental. The first two semesters of PRISMH consisted of sifting through over 300 applications for task force members and getting to know each other as a group, as well as learning what mental health resources already exist.
The task force, which now consists of undergraduate and graduate students in addition to faculty and staff across various fields, is now working in groups to brainstorm potential initiatives.
“It’s taken about a year to have a good sense of ‘we are PRISMH,’” Grier-Reed said.
“I like to get things done, so I’m feeling like we’re moving too slow, but according to everybody else we’re doing just fine,” Towle said.
A major goal for PRISMH is to examine how the university is delivering existing resources and making them more accessible and better-communicated.
One issue is YOU@UMN, an app and website that compiles health and wellness resources for students in addition to other functions. Towle said that the app’s name isn’t descriptive enough.
Another major goal is to train faculty and staff in mental health awareness so that they can identify and help struggling students. Towle said that one suggestion is an online training similar to the one that incoming students take for alcohol and sexual assault prevention.
PRISMH is seeking research grants for faculty to study the root causes of mental health problems in students.
“I think students should care and appreciate that the University puts this as a very high priority, their health and wellbeing, especially mental health,” Towle said.
After its three-year run, the initiative will be absorbed into the Office of Student Affairs.