JED Campus Initiative
In 2019, Chatham University joined the JED Campus initiative through the generous support of the Citrone Family Foundation.
The JED Campus initiative promotes a comprehensive public health approach to improving students’ emotional wellbeing, preventing suicide, and decreasing substance misuse.
JED’s comprehensive approach focuses on four major themes:
Enhancing protective/preventive factors and resilience (life skills and connectedness)
Early intervention (identifying those at risk and increasing help seeking)
Availability and access to clinical services
Increasing environmental safety
These four themes include seven strategic areas:
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Numerous studies show that social and emotional learning approaches are effective at building social and emotional skills. These core skills not only improve social, emotional and academic functioning, but also serve as powerful protective and coping tools modulating tough times and keeping potentially suicidal youth, adolescents, and adults safe.
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Empirical evidence clearly suggests that people need connection to others as well as a connected sense of belonging to the community. This need for connection is particularly salient for college students who have often left family, friends, and community behind.
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Timely identification of those at risk is critical in the effort to link people to help. Studies also suggest that groups such as men as well as Blacks, Asians, & Hispanics have higher internalized stigma and other barriers to care and may need additional outreach and prevention efforts before they seek help.
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Barriers which reduce help-seeking include beliefs that one should solve problems on one’s own, that it is weak to have problems, that one might be judged by others, and that friends and family may not see help-seeking as legitimate. Seeking help is a common part of life and impacted by age, sex, minority status, and rural vs. urban location.
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Best practice guidelines call for suicidal thoughts and behavior to be addressed directly by evidence-based approaches in addition to treating any underlying disorder. Most people at risk for suicidality do not receive professional care. When adequate care is available, treatment is effective at reducing rates of death by suicide.
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Arranging the environment to decrease suicidal behavior is highly effective and life-saving for the majority of people considering a suicide attempt.
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While all college students face challenges including social, emotional, financial, and academic pressures, students of color often experience additional sources of psychological distress. Discrimination, imposterism, stigma, cultural mistrust, and feelings of isolation are among the factors that can adversely impact the mental and emotional well-being of students of color. Compounding these stressors is the reality that college students of color are less likely to seek and to receive mental health treatment even though they have similar rates of diagnosable mental illness compared to white students.
Chatham’s JED Campus Team
Chatham’s JED Campus Team is co-led by Dr. Jennifer Morse, Professor, Counseling Psychology and Executive Director of Counseling & Wellness and Cindy Kerr, Director, Office of Academic and Accessibility Resources. The team includes four subcommittees comprised of staff, faculty, and students who are dedicated to bringing mental health awareness to the University community.
Equity in Mental Health
The JED Campus initiative includes a framework for equitable implementation and equity in mental health which recognizes the responsibility to ensure that the needs of students who are potentially marginalized and/or underserved due to societal and structural inequities and school-specific community demographics are considered deliberately and intentionally.
This equity framework recommends:
identifying and promoting mental health and well-being of students of color as a campus-wide priority
engaging students to provide guidance and feedback on matters of student mental health and emotional well-being
actively recruiting, training, and retaining a diverse and culturally competent faculty and professional staff
creating opportunities to engage around national and international issues/events
creating dedicated roles to support well-being and success of students of color
supporting and promoting accessible, safe communication with campus administration and an effective response system
offering a range of supportive programs and services in varied formats
helping students learn about programs and services by advertising and promoting through multiple channels
identifying and utilizing culturally relevant and promising programs and practices, and collecting data on effectiveness
participating in resource and information sharing within and between schools
Text on this website comes from three JED Foundation documents: