College Students and Mental Health: What Are They Saying? Featuring Biology Major, Brent

Welcome back to another installment of my blog series, College Students on Mental Health! My name is Bri, and I am the Wellness Operations Intern here at Project Passport. For the last couple of blogs in this series, we have focused on men’s mental health when it comes to college campuses and working to break the stigma of talking about mental health. I interviewed Brent Ryerson, who is currently a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is studying Biology. 

Brent claims that higher education, along with his major, has made it a point to address mental health and has changed his perspective on the topic since starting college. He notes that the conversation about mental health in his classes and on college campuses was one of the biggest changes he noticed from high school, where these topics were not talked about as much.

Brent says that he has “Started to realize how important [mental health] truly is and that many people around me also struggle with mental health.”

When it comes to prioritizing his mental health, Brent emphasizes how college was a big change for him and shifted his perspective on prioritizing his well-being.

A big mental health moment for him was… “When I was going through a breakup at the beginning of college and in a completely new environment. I had to make a point to take time for myself and step away from certain activities to ensure my mental health was okay. This impacted how much I valued mental health and made me realize prioritizing it is very important and necessary, especially during times of high stress.”

We have spent a lot of time in this blog series talking about the implementation of mental health resources, and Brent weighed in with his opinion on this topic. While he believes that there are professors and faculty members who genuinely value mental health and support the students’ overall well-being, he thinks that outside pressure and the desire to appear like a healthy environment push the universities to address mental health. He notes that “sometimes the mass emails or events regarding mental health seem pretty forced and not voluntary. I feel like institutions care more about their image than the actual mental health of their students”. When it comes to what UNC-Chapel Hill has implemented, Brent thinks that his university has been effective with implementing mental wellness days as they plan them in a way that allows students a break (adding them onto weekends or other days off). Even though he believes the wellness days are effective, he does suggest that implementing therapy resources to make them more available for students, as most university resources are seen as ineffective and underfunded. 

Working to break the stigma is only a small part of the mental health process when it comes to bettering students’ experiences in higher education, but as I wrap up my last semester in university, I realize how important it is to do so.

Opening the door for important conversations such as this one allows for student voices to be heard and will start the process of the changes we would all like to see when it comes to the resources and accessibility of such resources on college campuses.

I hope this blog series is able to spark conversations and inspire students to speak out and push for more conversations and change in higher education.