Credit: (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

College students statewide are feeling enormous emotional and social pressures navigating the challenges of an ongoing pandemic that has taken a significant toll on their mental health.

Lawmakers seeking to ease the burden on both students and faculty are hoping to pass the College Mental Health Services Act, which cleared the Assembly last week. The bill would create a three-year grant program distributing money to public universities to reduce wait times for students who need mental health services, employ more mental health therapists, and increase awareness among students of the resources that are available to them.

The bill also requires public colleges and universities to post on their school’s website the ratio of students to mental health therapists, the average time students waited to see a mental health professional and how many students were referred to mental health services outside the school. The nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services estimates that the grant program would cost the state a maximum of $5 million a year, based on details of similar programs in other states.

“We are working towards having more acceptance of the fact that this is a part of life, that mental health challenges face all sorts of people in all sorts of contexts, and certainly in the higher education context,” said Assemblywoman Sadaf F. Jaffer (D-Middlesex).

The legislation comes during a time when university students are coping with the emotional toll of an ongoing pandemic that has created prolonged periods of isolation, limited social interactions and produced increases in anxiety and depression.

Jaffer, a researcher and lecturer at Princeton University who has been teaching in college classrooms for over 10 years, said there have always been students who struggle, but it’s more intense now.

The pandemic factor

A survey by Active Minds, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advocacy and research for mental health in young adults, said 89% of college students listed stress and anxiety from the pandemic as having an impact on their lives. To add to this, 56% of young adults said they experienced anxiety or a depressive disorder during the pandemic, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The grant program is intended to allow for a sustained focus on mental health across public college campuses statewide.

“In the context of the pandemic, I think that there’s been really renewed focus on mental health,” Jaffer said. “But we need to make sure that it’s not just a one-time focus. …We realize that mental health concerns are perennial. They’ve always been there.”

Even before the pandemic began, mental health challenges among young adults were a major concern both nationally and statewide.

The concerns for young adult and student mental health are echoed by Scott Woodside, the director of the Wellness Center at Rowan University.

“We’re really here to, you know, help with the acute and the short-term issues, but really a lot of our focus is educating our students to be healthy long after they graduate,” he said.

Long-term approach

Woodside said he hopes there will be final language in the bill that puts an emphasis on wellness, not just on acute mental illness and therapy. Rowan is prioritizing wellness through Rowan Thrive, a campus-wide program that emphasizes the physical, emotional, social and community well-being of its students.

But the woes of the pandemic continue to complicate life for college and university students.

“Students are having trouble building connections with other people,” said Mariana Cardenas, a graduate student at Rowan University pursuing a master’s degree in diversity and inclusion. “Even knowing how to interact with one another. Starting off those conversations, students are having a lot of anxiety around that because … of the pandemic.”

Cardenas said that people often do not know how to interact with each other. And often they tend not to have support systems and friend groups they can confide in. Instead of being able to talk to someone about interpersonal issues, whether it’s a breakup or perhaps a dispute with the one friend that they have, those circumstances can become crisis situations.

“I knew I had to find good balance,” said Heather Doerr, another Rowan student. “My mental health needed to come first in order for me to be successful and to be there for a family.”

Doerr, an undergraduate student taking summer classes at Rowan, works out of the wellness center there as a peer educator. Doerr, who is married and has two children, quit her job as a data analyst a year and a half ago because of the exasperating stress of working from home during the pandemic.

She  said she has learned to balance her schoolwork and mental health by establishing a self-care routine.

Finding help

Cardenas has found help, too, through the Women of Color Collective in the Office of Social Justice, Inclusion and Conflict Resolution at Rowan. Cardenas was involved with the resource group throughout the year. “It was a really incredible environment where not only myself, but the other women of color in the group … felt safe talking about issues specifically affecting them,” she said.

Cardenas found another welcoming and safe space on campus through U Good F.A.M.?, a program created by Dr. Kha’ Sadler to promote mental health and emotional well-being among students of color. “I really looked forward to the group because I felt like afterwards … I breathed a little easier.”

“Certainly, the LGBTQ community, communities of color, because of the added stresses that they face have more mental health challenges to deal with and often don’t seek out the help that they need,” Jaffer said. “And so … specifically making sure that we are addressing those needs of those communities is absolutely essential.”

A companion version of the bill has been introduced in the Senate but not yet heard in committee. The bill will go into effect immediately if passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Phil  Murphy.