Mental health collaborative aims to help students on NC campuses through their battles
From multiple students who have taken their own lives, to school shootings, to remote learning during a global pandemic, the typical college experience for a North Carolina student has been anything but usual.
Add on the usual stressors of homework, extracurriculars and being away from home and it’s easy to see why mental health is something many students say they grapple with.
“Over and over we found mental health matters to our community,” said Emmy Martin.
Martin is in her junior year at UNC. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel.
Last year, Martin was awarded a $10,000 grant through the Solutions Journalism Network. Her idea was to create a collaborative publication between multiple universities with a focus on mental health coverage.
“In the end we had nine newsrooms,” said Martin. “Many of them are actually private institutions which was slightly different than my original intention of having only folks that were inside the UNC system.”
The junior said she was pleased with the end result, saying she thought it “adds a really interesting perspective.”
Martin continued, “If we’re looking at the resources Duke has compared to A&T, it’s going to look different. I think it adds a lot of nuances to our project, which is great.”
NC State’s Technician is one of the nine publications involved.
Led by co-editors-in-chief Jameson Wolf and Ethan Bakogiannis, the newsroom was eager to contribute to the effort when Martin reached out.
“Immediately we were like yes, this is something we’d want to be involved with,” said Wolf.
Wolf explained she and Bakogiannis had already been discussing on their own how to better cover mental health topics after a difficult 2022-2023 school year.
“Last school year was really difficult here on campus,” said Wolf. “We saw a significant spike in student deaths by suicide and every single person on campus was trying to figure out a way to navigate that.”
When talking about some of her own experiences covering mental health as a student journalist, Wolf recalled, “Our very first week as editors-in-chief, we covered two student deaths on campus within 24 hours.”
Students from all nine universities met in Charlotte before the start of this school year to come up with a game plan.
More than six months later, The Mental Health Collaborative was officially released. The special issue features entirely mental health-related topics and is available online and in print.
Martin explained putting the pieces together served a dual purpose by allowing the student journalists to heal from talking to other students, while also connecting people to available resources.
“These people who are working at The Daily Tar Heel or the Duke Chronicle or the Technician or the Niner Times, they also are friends with a lot of people in the community they’re covering,” said Marin. “I think that’s a very interesting place to be when something tragic happens.”
Wolf agreed the experience was helpful for her, adding, “It also helped me to be able to say, ‘Oh these are resources on campus that I should be taking advantage of and that I should be taking part in.’ There are things I can do to support myself.”
Both students say they hope the collaboration can continue in the future.
Martin said she especially hopes it will get the attention of administrators at campuses across the state to highlight the importance of investing in mental health resources for students and staff.
“This mental health collaborative is just the foundation. We just started the conversation in a way that might be different in a way we’ve previously talked about it,” said Martin. “There are so many more stories people can tell.”
