Hi everyone, my name is Bri, and I am the Wellness Operations intern here at Project Passport. If you are new to my blog series, welcome to College Students on Mental Health, a series aimed to promote the vocalization of mental health-related topics in young adults to help encourage the implementation of better resources for those in need. Over the past couple of months, I have shifted my focus to specifically men’s mental health on college campuses, which we will divulge further in this blog. Today I interviewed Anthony Ryerson, a sophomore at North Carolina State University studying Finance with two minors in Economics and Statistics. 

While Anthony says his major itself has not changed his perspective on mental health, he emphasizes prioritizing mental health in higher education when it comes to weeks that are exam-heavy or more intensive than other weeks. “It changes my perspective by showing me how not stressing out and overworking myself makes me feel better and also helps me do better on exams,” Anthony says. Being able to take time for yourself during these weeks is crucial, as it is easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of studying and work that needs to be completed and you can easily run down your mind and body by overworking and not taking breaks. 

When it comes to higher education institutions implementing mental health resources for students, Anthony believes that universities are putting these resources in place because of outside pressure to do so. He emphasizes that because of this pressure, universities feel obligated to expand mental health-related programs and additional resources that they would not have genuinely implemented on their own in fear of backlash or people viewing the university negatively. With that being said, Anthony does believe that there are things that are not already implemented on campus that would better the mental health of the students attending. He thinks that “they should implement a system which allows for no more than two exams in a week, and allows for students to spread out their workload more efficiently, no matter what classes they are taking,” to help students relieve stress and school-related anxiety. 

When discussing mental health on college campuses, it is important that we create opportunities for everyone’s voices to be heard. Starting a dialogue about mental health in a time that is stressful for almost any student is vital to creating the change that we would like to see when it comes to access to resources and the expansion of important mental health programs. My goal with this series is to create a safe space where students of all backgrounds feel empowered to share their thoughts and feelings about mental health topics and get a personalized opinion on what universities could be doing better for their students.